the garden | Beat Valley

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Honestly You Shouldn’t

June 25, 2015 by beat valley

So many racist jokes get their start from an impression that some black names can make hilariously inconvenient homophones or onomatopoeia. Even John Updike named a young black man Tylenol in his final novel, I’m John Updike and 911 Just Happened So I’ll Be as Racist as I Wanna Get Terrorist. The funnier joke is […]

Blueberries

February 9, 2015 by lars russell

I really love blueberries. There is the crisp blue of a spring day and then there is the abysmal color of the blueberry, blue as Krishna, a blue that seems darker than black because instead of the flat lack of tone the little bit of pigment makes looking into it like the deepest part of […]

The Cinema

August 2, 2012 by beat valley

I had a hole in my pocket and two pieces of the earth fell out. One was a meteorite sold to me behind Amoeba Records by a man In Berkeley. He said it came from the site of a starfall in Arizona. The other was a bone from the creek in Austin. I went reaching […]

In Which Fox 6 Outwits Brother Bear, and Other Capers

May 23, 2012 by lars russell

It didn’t surprise Fox 6 when she catch up with Brother Rabbit that last time, stuck in the tar trap between a pair of fallen cypresses in the dried creek rut. She had laid the trap, so that part of it didn’t surprise her at all, not at all; but the fulfillment of this chase […]

Question

February 14, 2011 by beat valley

you know how speeches giving love such oft-corrupted figures as doves, roses, rays of sunshine make no clearer the matter than a zipper binds two ends of cloth in a closure you can’t rip apart or leave undone in error? imagine some well-intended maître d’, ardent, introducing specials while we slide our attention to satins […]

The Last Flower Children Guard San Francisco’s Most Secret Garden

September 19, 2010 by lars russell

The roses are going wild. Their blooms stick out through glittering tents. The broken greenhouse makes up one entire city block, a jagged surf of canopies ensnared with flowers and fallen glass. In a city of recognizable trifles, San Francisco’s most undiscovered landmark is locked away next to a reservoir and between two forking highways, […]

The Devil & King Christophe

January 21, 2010 by lars russell

Unfathomably swiftly speeded, Earth’s pomp revolves in whirling flight, As Eden’s brightness is succeeded By deep and dread-inspired night —Goethe’s “Faust”, 1806 Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson says Haiti has been “cursed” because of what he called a “pact with the devil” in its history. —Associated Press, January 13, 2010 Flower bundles are laid at the […]

Sunday After the War

July 24, 2005 by lars russell

When I don’t know where to begin you say start at the beginning. But I don’t remember the very beginning. I must start with what I remember. Everywhere we were caught up in terror and we had to fend for ourselves. The demand was silence and yet I had nothing to be silent about. When […]