moon traveller herald

Reading NY Science Times this week and there was an interesting article about the replacement submersible for Alvin , the long-chugging oceanaut that discovered among many things Titanic. It has been 40 years since this counrty forged Alvin. We are only talking $50 M or $150 M here, but undersea diving bells sort of peaked back then. But they are trying again. Cause Alvin, like the old carnival ride Nautilus Jake and I rode in 1995 at Disneyland is long in the tooth and not futuristic. Very interesting to see how they are going about replacing Alvin, and hoping to better its maximum depth by about 20% [to about 3 miles] so as to be able to cover about 90% of the Earth’s ocean’s bottoms. To go where tremendous pressures press. And lo and behold but the work of the forging is going on at Ladish Works in Cudahay Wisc. I must say after all the great manufacturers that bit the dust since I left Wisconsin in 1972 I am surprised to see Ladish is still at it. So here is my Ladish story. When ...

Picked up on John Sinclair and his travels site where he recently posted his version of the Sunnyland Blues . It’s largely based on parts of the one Slim and I did. It appeared first in Fattening Frogs for Snakes , his blues poetry opus published in 2002 by the Surregional Press. John talked to me before he appropriated vast quantities of my piece. We discussed it, and jointly decided it was in the spirit of the blues to steal and borrow. It’s a premise of the blues to work with things that are out there, and adapt them with a new level of abstraction or different perspective. This is apparent in such scholarships as The Blues Line complied by Eric Sackheim [Schirmer Books, 1975] and in such rock albums as the Bob Dylan Time Out of Mind triptych, duly noted here and elsewhere. Sinclair dedicates his “Sunnyland Train” poem to me and Black Mike Henderson. Henderson played with Slim in the ‘70s as I recall. Sinclair does put his take on the original Sunnyland Blues. He matches my stuff ...

For Edward Albee. The doctor is the receptacle of the myth. The doctor found his week-dead wife In the jarred coffin On his lawn after the flood. The apples are getting heavy He said. And they are tearing down The limb. The doctor slit his wrist With an electric knife Cutting Thanksgiving turkey. In the old pylon pole South He’d let Bessie Smith To bleed on the highway Back when it rained Five days. The doctor is the receptacle Of the myth, And he is walking lazily Toward infinity. -Jack Vaughan