Saturday, April 20, 23:00 CDT
It's sleeting or raining or some fitful Spring combination of the two outside the garage where I'm typing this on the Old Computer. I came home Friday to help my dad move a ton or two of firewood, really spend some quality time with the new chainsaw he bought. I just didn't go back to school last night for whatever reason. Watched a movie with the family, wrote a single e-mail, went to my room and slept on the bare matress I haven't actually put sheets on since Christmas or so.
Wandering the library last week, or maybe the week before, I pulled a copy of 100 Poems from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth off the shelf. It had cool looking Chinese calligraphy on the spine, and even falling apart it's a wonderfully printed book. A short run from some Italian press, I think. The poems were good, mostly too melancholy to dwell very long on in Spring at the age of 21 and trying not to be a sad bastard, and all translated from people I'd never heard of.
I've read a bunch of Rexroth since then. Some poetry, a bunch of essays. It's clear to me he was what you'd call a towering intellectual figure. Someone whose writing, let alone whose life, utterly defies encapsulation. Maybe that's why I wouldn't know he existed if it weren't for a semirandom bookshelf discovery.