It ain't exactly paradise, but put up a parking lot, anyway

Just what Hartford needs. More parking lots. More pavement. Another grand genuflection to the car culture.

I'm sure Wallace Stevens would be spinning in his grave.

I mean, WTF. In another boneheaded move, the Hartford (insurance company) will tear down a beautiful old, still functioning, office building to create a parking lot.

Can you imagine this lot in Paris, or Vienna or Venice. There'd be plenty of places to park, but not much to visit.

Okay, strong mayor, whatcha gonna do?

The mind of winter

It's been awhile since Winter has stopped me dead in my tracks, but it happened today.

I left Connecticut just before it began to snow, on my way to a video shoot in Vermont. At about 1 pm it started snowing in Westminster, and by the time we packed the van, driving was nearly impossible. The snow fell so hard that the windshield wipers kept freezing. We made it one exit, and here we are in Putney at the Putney Inn. Not a bad place to find yourself snowed-in at. The food, was great, and mostly harvested from local farms.

The snow continues to fall, but the weathermen promise it'll stop by midnight. I'm sure the morning will be beautiful, and less treacherous.

The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is

Let be be finale of seem

At one point in my life, as an earnest master's degree candidate in English literature, the Wallace Stevens line which serves as headline for this post, made a lot of sense to me. It's from a favorite Wallace Stevens' poem, The Emperor of Ice Cream. Now, I see it's filled with unsolvable mystery, like much of Steven's poetry. And I wish I could've written it.

I was born on the same date, Oct. 2, as Wallace Stevens, and I worked for some time at an insurance company. There, I think, the coincidences end.

Stevens, who is considered to be a great American poet, lived and worked in Hartford, writing his dense and beautiful poetry as he walked back and forth to his office at the Hartford Life Insurance Company.

On Saturday, I'm celebrating my birthday with a "surprise" dance party with a bunch of friends. On Saturday, the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens will be celebrating his at the Hartford Public Library, where dancing will likely not occur.

What's he doing in there?

Lord knows what he'd make of Wallace Stevens, but Dick Cheney, and his lawyers have parsed every law or regulation that might check his seemingly autocratic power, and determined that they do not apply to him. He's sounding more and more like Darth Vader.

He's the Jesse James of the conservative movement - a right wing populist outlaw. He's able to scream about obeying the letter of the law, and then twisting the law into a Chinese puzzle for which only he has the key.

What question pops into your mind when you read these things?

What's he got to hide?