The Hayfield Forever

The life coach from Horns & Halo nodded toward the PowerPoint screen and its photograph of a man in his mid-forties.

“This man calls himself Dr. Edgar Scattergood and he’s in some hot water,” began Katy Brown.  ”First of all, he’s in a losing battle with the District Attorney’s office. I say “losing” because he outright defrauded people. We like to talk about goals at Horns & Halo and Scattergood’s goal is to outright defraud people and their families after they die. After they die. Clever to try to scam this particularly defenseless group, but the fact that he does it through websites is not so awfully clever.”

Methinks you’re slacking off, Telemachus. Not one sale, new client, or even a Target (widow or widower of one who left behind unpublished crap) found by you since winter.

Can’t continue to blame the District Attorney’s prosecution of your boss. Nope. Truth be told, no one outside of small circles within Missouri and Los Angeles even knows about the prosecution. Nope, this is about you. You haven’t crashed a lousy memorial service or funeral since last fall.

And, thus, no commissions in 2011.

“Clearly, we went too far on this one. We need Mary Shelley to best describe the odd yellow gleam in Thomas’s eyes.” –Dr. Catherine Shockley

In her very recent post, Professor Shockley suggests that Karen and Thomas’s use of Doppler principles to learn more about a character was an experiment that unfolded in the illest, most Frankenstein way.

But the text itself emits Doppler. This is the pinche deconstruction of a poem (along with a little reconstruction) and Doppler’s an apt device. Wallace Stegner showed us this in one of my favorite books, Angle of Repose. Angle says that Doppler is a physical and metaphysical law. What we hear and see coming right at us can be bigger than life. What we hear after can be distorted, lower in volume, buried.

Forget all that solstice jazz. That’s for the people who see stars in the sky. But I think that’s boring and plays hell with your neck!

Out here, I know it’s summer when I can see stars hovering just above the ground and hayfield, a blanket of constellations spread over the land. And unlike that inflexible old universe, these stars move! Constellations shift and merge and collapse right before your eyes. No need to wait billions of years! I’m pretty sure I couldn’t wait that long, even if I was able.

The best part? In this land-slung universe, every single one of those stars is out there burning…burning to get laid. And it’s life or death. No sex, no stars. What passion! What drama! Can’t say that about super-heated balls of gas, can you? When was the last time our sun ever tried to get down with Alpha Centauri? (Although, that would make for a pretty kinky three-way.)

And so, I give you the true start of summer, a terrestrial cosmos populated entirely by desperate, horny…fireflies.

Enjoy!

There is no legal limit in Missouri to a fictional character’s soaring Blood Alcohol Content (BAC). So long as it soars on one’s own make-believe property. And if L.C. Knights tried to ask us in his 1933 brilliant and mocking essay, “How Many Children Had Lady MacBeth?”, who really cares what’s happening beyond the text, I wonder how exasperated he would become at our speculation over what’s happening within a character’s bloodstream.

Yet, folks here at the hay farm insisted that the text of The Hayfield itself offers “internal evidence”. At Line 48, the poet experiences a Doppler Effect while Arnie mumbles his prayer while falling backwards. Karen thought this worth exploring but wasn’t sure where to begin. Her boyfriend, our very own Thomas Pinkhurst, is a bright graduate student in the literature department who already has a PhD in physics. Professional student. He knows his science. His math. And has pitch perfect hearing.

Hey Miguel,

Hope you can read my handwriting here. I knocked on your door for a bit with no answer. I’m hungover, too, so I don’t want to hang out here on the porch in the sun forever.

Anyway, attached is a first draft of a post about the summer solstice that Dr. Leucas told me to write. He also told me to run it by you before we post it. But you have to give me any comments by three today because we post the final version at 5:30, just before the exact moment of solstice. Thomas will help me with the science, of course.

Hope you’re up and at `em soon.

Karen

P.P.S.  If you had answered the door, I was going to greet you like this: “Summer is coming, Lord Starkweather, and it could last forever.”  Ha ha. Get it? Bet you’re sorry you missed me now.

_____________________________________

TO: Kansas City FBI office

FR: Deputy Pardo, Shannon County Sheriff’s office

DA: June 21, 2011

RE: Disappearance of Miguel Starkweather, Catherine Shockley, Odysseus “Odie” Leucas, and three other UCLA scholars.

The Sheriff told me to forward the attached manuscript to the Special Agent in charge of the Ozarks investigation. Anyone assigned yet?

The manuscript, a poem called “The Apothecary’s Kitchen: Lefka, 1947″ by Demod Smith, was found by yours truly at the Ozark farmhouse where the scholars were last seen.  It mentions a Greek grandmother (“Yiayia”), the Greek island of Lefka, and a dead apothecary. These might be leads.  We’re working them from our end.

I have jokingly offered to go to Lefka to investigate, but the wife and I are leaving tomorrow on a two-week vacation to California to see her folks, so the joke didn’t go very far.

_________________________________

This was tweeted tonight from somewhere out of the Ozarks. It might be a bastardization of Game of Thrones’ catchphrase, “Winter is coming, and it could last a lifetime.”

Word on the street is that the writers, characters, and 845 fans of The Hayfield Forever have been so engrossed in their Game of Thrones books, episodes, and drinking games that they neglected their own world. But Season One of Thrones ended last night, and the summer solstice tomorrow will rouse the Hayfielders out of their stupor and into Season Two of The Hayfield Forever.

I don’t spook easy. But this evening Karen showed me a post card sent from Greece in 1961 to this farm shortly after our poet Demod would have taken up here.  With a seed company magnet, the card was still stuck up on his frig. Like he got it last week.

On one side of the card, a black-and-white sketch reprint shows the ruins of Meton’s Observatory in Athens.

On the other, somebody scrawled this cheerful stanza:

“And the moon in haste eclipsed her,
and the sun in anger swore
his wick would curl within him
and give light to you no more.”

From the Los Angeles Business Journal

Horns & Halo of Venice, California announced today that it was honoring associates Katy Brown and Glenn Wichman for their “outstanding” work as Life Coaches in Los Angeles. H & H founder and owner Marcia Deitsch Zimmer has set the dinner for early July.

“Glenn and Katy are the horns & halo of our company,” said Zimmer. “They have coached many on how to change their lives for the better and so this dinner with our staff and clients to honor their work is fitting.”