Most Hustle & Desire

    “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”   ― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World   Where memory fails us: MEXICO '61 . This is a coming-of-age story told by three boyhood friends, all with differing accounts of a trip to Mexico in 1961. The story addresses antisemitism, racism, sexual exploitation, and poverty in the 1950s to 60s.

   "Far. / Dark. / Cold. / (I am on a journey toward a distant / And perfect wound)" -- Thomas McGrath The destructive force of mining booms on the land and human lives is not a new phenomenon. Great aunts and uncles spoke of the demoralizing nature of the iron-ore rich town of Hurley, Wisconsin. Wisconsin has been caught up, too, in the more recent fracking boom in the Bakken region. In 2012, I witnessed the sand dug from new pits, dropped into hundreds of freight cars circling up to new elevators on new looping tracks, hauled west and blown forgettably under the Great Plains.  Recently I was able to document one of the North Dakota truck drivers, an old classmate, who was part of this boom. He is an energized individual and, like any of us, divided within from the need to be more. It is the riving of lives as his that has driven the fracking industry, to eke a bit of oil and gas from the earth: (D)RIVEN.

    About five years ago, I tried translating Andrey Platonov’s poetry, Blue Depths (Golubaya glubina, 1922). Not because it is his mentionable work — I had been told that it is not — but because of a curiosity in the origins of this noted writer of the 20th century. In my efforts, I was happy to come across the beautiful translations of Robert Chandler (et al) as guide, and yet, I found that many of Platonov’s texts remain untried and much of his language unparsed.  Recently, Andrew Krizhanovsky, a computer scientist and a fellow Platonovist (platonoved), and I have been captivated, or held captive, by Platonov’s “The Behidden Man (Sokrovennyy chelovek)”, and in particular, this line:    People were raising a ruckus, the rails were groaning under the knock of the forcibly rotated wheels, the hollow of their rounded world was wavering in fetid nightmare, fitting the train with shrieking air, — and Pukhov was shivved into the wind along with everyone e...