Liquor Of Flints

Put your popcorn down the concertina and beans a gargantuan emotion is about to become gasoline and explode into talk conversation is inherently panoramic a parable of the sky in a stellar library gurgling loafs of idea rain in a jar armed with a powerful grip. A sorcerer will restore the kangaroos as a light explores the room with an oboe and a hoe it will deepen our sense of cosmology and sparkle among these lines as if envy were a seminal condition for silk and turned into an airplane not softly like a wheel but emphatic like a decision sometimes a bath will feel personal and include some semen and deepen our sense of cosmology and sometimes a wink to the mink will punctuate speech. I don’t know what I’d do without Cézanne lift a chisel and carve a wave breaking on the sand maybe or create an attitude in tin read adult magazines and watch the swallows under the bridge the pulley squeaks as I bring the laundry in and Jack London sits at his desk blossoming into an incentive. There are properties employed in poetry such as donkeys and postulation surreys are used for contrast if we choose to navigate the solar system we must also employ a horoscope and our favorite irritation. A knife tumbling through the air is always unpredictable because a parody is almond and our elbows are on the table. The imagery of birth is grotesque the natural thing to do is run away as hard as you can and find a wad of money in the snow rub the calliope and the genie will tell you where to find the nutmeg it’s up there high on the topmost shelf. We should smell boycotts and brushwork by spring which a jaunty elf reproduces by exhalation further away in time and space is a tornado just as it is beginning to acquire real power let’s go scrounge for another parable something implicit in linen the ink is bubbly with umbrellas and I can make out a coast baroque with rocks and aerial splendor a dancing bear carved in ivory on a palette of rain and a sonnet assembled with glue and intuition. The light has a peculiar hue and there are roots descending into the earth socks tumbling in a dryer that grandeur we find in ourselves during times of catastrophe agrees with that ever present glow of hope the thin gaze in a milk of paradise hints of Alaska and a group of lost astronauts passing through a door. Morality is hirsute with bears on the road of excess earth bursting out of itself shouting has a vertical dimension in climbing a stepladder we feel our inner wounds swelling into language the larynx damp with vowels the process is like a staircase a symptom of terminal baseball the space is spherical and wild and drooling like a hill. There is sunshine below a pretty smile even the gantry has an odor it smells like a tiger hugged by its reflection in a pool of unearthly water surrounded by lush Indian greenery. Ocher is not a good color for vanity I would recommend the orange in a fire leaping around a Russian doll. And let’s face it genitalia male or female is Byzantine and curious like a dream of oysters. Meanwhile a new paradigm is being assembled from sandstone and the origins of life the cows are titanic long and sweet like the antiphons of plainsong. We discover our truer natures in plays while it is a serious duty to hoist our deeper wounds into view using metaphors of blood squirting during surgery in a palace of ice. There is a climate of sexual linoleum and a rack of rifles as the afternoon approaches outwardly pious but inwardly golden in its sense of seclusion it’s a start not a conclusion consciousness under a hat chowder in a chipped bowl words swimming in a book there is no yardstick to measure piety only buffalo grazing by the river the contraption is linguistic by that I mean writing writing is not a club anyone can join one word to another word and discover the residual language of a foreign perspective the proverbial brass ring the green stepladder luxuries such as feet and pineapple fingers the sky is a soft hazy intuitive blue it’s time now to contact the mud get down and dirty feel the inscrutably sweet milieu of fantasy and calculus such as Leibnitz originally intended it fluxions of magic the exaltation of walking this path leads to Buddhism heave forward rippling toward the shore push yourself into hunger perceptions of depth brushes dipped in red apples and eggnog anticipate the sublime pain is often linked to pleasure and revolt newly minted on a tongue of gold consciousness sparkling in a syringe soft and squishy as grease it is a milieu of folds and convolutions it is more spoon than fork more fork than knife highways of red ants and distant buttes elevators going up elevators going down sticky fingers murmuring of sexual dreams the smell of freshly baked bread.

Baus House

Scared Text, poetry by Eric Baus
The Center For Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, 2011

When Saussure developed his theory of the diacritical structure of language, that is to say the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, he might have imagined a linguistic universe such as that developed by Eric Baus in this collection of poetry. The word ‘fabulous’ comes to mind, not just as the enthusiastic adjective of praise and endorsement, but in its deeper sense as a sign of the inconceivable, the phenomenal, the marvelous, the mythic. A world of thought in which the face of the universe is a provocation of choice and exception, an immunity to the stultifying claims of the drably empirical.

Yet, what we have is not a sacred text, but a scared text. Which might also read ‘scarred.’

Scared, scarred, scoriated.

Nothing depends on a wheelbarrow.

The wheelbarrow is a sign, glazed with semanticism, beside the white chimeras.

In “Votive Scores,” for example, we have a vigorous play on dialectical offertories:

If eels lie vertically inside the statue or old bees coat its surface, a needle will point to the center of my hide. Owls murmured up a piece of green cloth. Hard ash topped me. The birds it entailed people the treetops, stripped me of my coos. Un-tuned doves flew elsewhere, worried their drones would shrink inside my ears. A second split occurred when its eyes bloomed red. Votive scores pushed open the view. Here, the street was both omen and throat. The swarming sky sparrowed until day withered, until the statue punched out of its skin. He was wearing his own arms. His house showed. Ants formed and he scorched their trails. Sing rendered. he trilled, Sing posed.

The central trope here, of course, is music. A score is music written down in such a way that the parts for different performers appear vertically above one another, i.e. “eels lie vertically inside the statue or old bees coat its surface” is a score embedded in the wax of the imagination. A votive offering is one or more objects deposited in a sacred place in order to gain favor with supernatural forces.

The sentence “Here, the street was both omen and throat” mingles the ideal with the real, the theoretical with the empirical. An omen is a phenomenon of the mind. A throat is a biological reality. A street leads to places. A throat, like a street, channels the air from our lungs to the larynx where it is vibrated into sound then led to the mouth where it is shaped into syllables.

Music is a perfect trope for this work because music is non-representative. It is what it is. It refers to nothing. The sound is all. The pattern is all. Harmony, rhythm, melody, and pitch. Conflict and resolution. Music is a sacred analogue of scared life.

The number of animals in this piece is interesting. Eels, bees, owls, birds, ants. Small animals. Two species, bees and ants, noted for their swarms. Owls for their nocturnal habits, wisdom, and omen of death. Eels are weird. Slippery. Though good eating. And sometimes charged with electricity. Taken as signs, these creatures recommend tonal analogues for sensory experience.

Sounds are much easier to produce, combine, perceive, and identify. This is why music appeals with such immediacy to our feelings and rock stars fill stadiums and even the most mediocre musicians are guaranteed an audience larger than that of our greatest poets. Words make us think. They might be signs with no actual connection to their referents, but they do engage the intellect, and most people would, quite naturally, not have to do with their intellect. Intellection is work.

Poets like Baus bring us to the frontier of language, that place where words as signs of arbitrary connection to the real are at their slipperiest. In “Owl Wool,” a short prose poem of three sentences, we find a density of assonance and alliteration burning in a conglomerate study of the relationship between words and music:

The sky fermented a cotton tarp. The baffled voiceover spread. Iris’s dove scored itself with scales while owl wool coated the cliffs.

I especially like the assonantal and semantic play on ‘scored’ and ‘scales.’ Scales can be appreciated both as musical signs for the melodic material of music and the thin, plate-like lamina on lizards and snakes. Also, the play on ‘owl’ and ‘wool’ followed by the alliteration of ‘coated’ and ‘cliffs.’

Baus likes brevity. There are few pieces of length in this collection. “A Delphi,” which begins “Minus tried to write his own bible It began, So what, saliva. So what, milk,” is one of the longer pieces, at six pages, and has a narrative tinge. It evokes, rather than tells, a story, switching back and forth from the third person to first person point of view. “I like lies,” it is tellingly stated, and “I like hills. They feel like hands.” The central character is Minus. One thinks of the Minos of Greek fable, and the numerical sign ‘minus,’ in which things are subtracted, taken away. There is an interesting parallel here, since Minos, the King of Crete who every year made King Aegeus pick seven men and seven women to enter Daedalus’s labyrinth to be eaten by the Minotaur, became a judge of the dead in Hades, and ‘minus’ as a numerical sign means to subtract, take away. Consequently, we have a Minus who begins a bible by mocking the very language used to write the bible, i.e. mocks the semantic gravity of saliva and milk.

The Delphi also bears significance within the above context since it was the most important oracle in the classical Greek world and a site for the worship of Apollo who took residence there after slaying the Python, the deity that previously inhabited that spot and protected the navel of the Earth.

I find it encouraging that this is a collection of prose poetry and won the Colorado prize for poetry. This strongly suggests the acceptance of the prose poem as a legitimate poetic form. Poetry, it would appear, is evolving into organisms with multiple limbs. It is allowed more breadth, it is less constricted by dusty Victorian ideas of metric structure. It is given the expansive breath of Olson’s projective verse and Whitman’s gymnastic reach. It is more profoundly physical. Its practitioners and architects have been eager to demonstrate the microcosmic possibilities of Joseph Cornell’s boxes. A place, like a house, in which strange furniture and the bricolage of experience pose fascinating problems to the agile mind.

The Smell Of The Mind When It's Floating On Words

Breath imparts being, words served in earth, like a yak. Words are the ghosts of things hives full of honey symptoms of string causing music to happen. Poetry is forged in the furnace of the heart. It rides up and down on cables in allegorical space. Press all the buttons to see what happens.

Rain happens. Sequoias happen. The world happens.

Horses are created by blowing into a trumpet. The radio comes alive and unfolds itself in shrubbery. Longing arrives in a harmonica. Morning arrives in a box of dishwasher soap congealed into lumps.

Heft is evident in seaweed. Divinity is evident in scripture. People stand in line waiting for a deity to arrive. I can feel a soup of vibrations emerge from a bell and move in my being like a womb of sound transforming into an idea.

There is difficulty getting the deity through customs. She transforms herself into a shawl and enters the country profligate and green.

To describe a circle is to describe a heaven under construction. Which later assumes the allure of a large pink hole.

It seems completely reasonable to go without a shirt while walking along the rails in the heat of a Mexican afternoon. The mind, accelerated by Dexedrine, follows the shimmer of heat above the splintered ties and crunch of gravel.

Monstrosity is a feature of poetry. Mutation is natural. Wave moves into wave. A gypsy woman squirts light from her eyes. It tastes of salt. I can feel myself turning into a flamingo. I grow wings and feel myself lifted by a light blue breath.

I study the air. I can see a filament of sound rubbing itself to get warm.

The distance is squeezed into a jar of time. I feel it sing in my veins like protein. I am a calliope I hang upside down in the water.

The coast is where whispers go to die.

The last time I was in San Francisco, thought John Lennon, I combined a noise with an image and a song emerged from my throat irritating the skin of my ears with its fuzzy vibrato as it translated three o’clock into a glittering stream of typewriter fire.

I can smell a mind when it is thinking. It smells like a cross between a Roman taxi and a root beer float.

All the door does is hang on its hinges clapping its hands.

Picasso sits down to immerse himself in pink. He drifts in reverie. He imagines himself swimming over the ribbed sand of Arizona with a mistletoe in his mouth and paints an eyeball lost in the cracks of suitcase as a woman falls through a bank statement and a piece of music is folded into a pond in the middle of a forest.

The air is quiet and cold. It begins to rain. There are peacocks in the parking lot and a man out walking his dog disappears around a corner. The hotel is reasonable. There is a chair and a desk and a curtain in the window. Cause and effect is a contingent feature. There may be cases where the effect precedes its cause, and an impenetrability of physical laws.

Sometimes it grows so quiet you can hear the smell of the mind as it floats on a mediation of gauze.

Moss

There is a time in the afternoon in deep winter when, if the sun is out, the moss on the surface of the balustrade of Queen Anne boulevard goes into high definition and turns iridescent. It is green beyond belief. It looks like a thick carpet, but with a lumpy, irregular surface and little whiskery shoots bristling among the prominences.

Moss is ubiquitous in the northwest. It covers everything. Roofs, walls, trees, gables, gallstones, gargoyles, garages. Moss loves moisture. And there is plenty of moisture in the northwest. The northwest is to moisture what mecca is to Islam. What ovals are to eggs. What monuments are to wars. What shadows are to light. If moss were a form of credit, it would be the International Exchange of the global credit default swap swamp.

But moss is insistently, consistently moss. That’s what makes moss, moss. To compare moss to something else is to lose the mossness of moss.

I am charmed by moss. It is original and massive. It spreads like a superstition throughout all the balustrades and coffeehouse bricks of the dripping northwest.

It feels like an animal. If you brush your hand over its surface very softly, it feels remarkably like fur.

If you get lost in the woods, look for moss on one side of the tree. That will be the north side of the tree. North, where the sunlight is blocked. Moss likes shade. It feeds on dark things, like the necropolis of the Etruscans.

The moss growing on the balustrade of 7th Avenue West seems anomalous in its obvious appreciation of sunlight. Is it a species apart from the usual moss that carpets the shady nooks and recesses of the Pacific Northwest?

Yesterday, I had to stop by the balustrade to tie my shoelace. I was doing my usual afternoon run and was moist beneath my running clothes. I felt the cold immediately. I raised my leg and positioned my foot in the hole of the balustrade. A sharp winter breeze blew through the hole. I looked to the west where the sun was already beginning to set. The light was sharp. The moss stood out in high relief, attracting my attention to the spot where I had rested my gloves, black wool against a patch of green iridescence. It felt like an elegy. A sweet rag of holy fuzz marking the end of a day in early January.

Bones To Rattle The Storms Of The Spirit

Human anatomy fascinates me. Fingers fascinate me. Hands fascinate me. Feet fascinate me. Intestines, heart, brain, blood vessels, muscle, nerves, bone, genitalia, membrane, phlegm, hormone, cartilage, shoulder, tongue, and skin fascinate me. Maybe I should have been a doctor. Except I don’t like touching other people. Unless, of course, I am in love with them.

Human anatomy is a marvel of ingenuity. Imagine you are an engineer in heaven and God comes up to you and says hey you know what I was thinking of making a creature that can walk and talk and make things, any ideas?

Legs and feet would not immediately come to mind. They do now, of course, because I already know what they are. I have them. I use them. I can’t figure out how two disproportionately small organs can support my entire body much less help move it about, but if I try to unimagine them, unthink them, imagine a situation before they ever existed, entered into time and history, I can’t do that. All I can do is marvel at the ingenuity of it all.

And hands. My god hands. Fingers. Thumbs. Grasping things. Feeling things. Picking things. Pinning things. Plucking guitar strings. Holding a pen and making words with it. Letters. Pulling doors open. Turning knobs. Fondling breasts. Cupping a book. Pounding nails. Tapping keys on a keyboard. Pinching and squeezing and manipulating things. Knots, buttons, dials. Coins, trapezes, talismans.

Arms are a lot like tree branches except they move with much more suppleness. And don’t have leaves growing out of them. They culminate in fingers. Fingers give arms a life beyond the pedestrian function of holding a spoon or filing a bank statement. Fingers enlighten the arms and mind with the texture of a grapefruit or the telling physiognomy of a rock. If I were to go blind, I could use my fingers as eyes, touching the texture of the text of a book in braille. The meanings of the words would enter my fingers as bumps and travel through my nerves to my brain where they would form an image and out of that image I would find emotion and meaning.

Legs are both supports for the framework of my body and a source of locomotion. Insects have more than two legs. Centipedes can have anywhere from 20 to 300. I do not find that particularly enviable. More than two legs would be confusing. I like the rhythm of two. Two legs in motion. Walking. Or running. First one leg, then the other. Propelling me forward. Carrying me where I want to go.

Everything is contained in skin. I am contained in a sack of skin. I am a letter of organs in an envelope of skin addressed to no one in particular. It is stretched around my bones. Otherwise, I would be a sack of skin with a pair of eyes looking up. We need bones. Bones to drive a car. Bones to open doors. Bones to get dressed and draw and ride escalators and interact in dramas and make speeches and hear it. Bones to ferret the mystery of death. Bones to rattle the storms of the spirit.

Out In The Open

I love the way bubbles float and drift in a room catching the light and sparkling and popping never to exist again. The hands of the clock jerk forward dragging time across a landscape of glass and cats and rumbling dishwasher afternoons. There are hooks for our clothes and pegs for our capes and hats. Symmetry both fascinates and repels me. I look for redemption wherever I can find it. I get up in the morning and drink coffee and listen to news from France and scribble my way into sweet oblivion. Life is an enigma. Insoluble. Animals seem to have a better grasp of it. Yet nothing alters perception like altering one’s consciousness with philosophy or enthusiasm for books.

Doorknobs darken over time into that color they call verdigris. You can find the word in the dictionary, burning and oceanic. I don’t like dressing up in a gaudy manner especially if I am dragging a heavy load of garbage to the bin in back of our apartment building. Hinduism has a certain appeal though my feelings about religion are erratic and vague. I wouldn’t want to be trapped in a belief. I would rather leap from inquiry to inquiry in a novel from the late 19th century. A time when Cézanne would leave his cottage to go paint a mountain. His brush and eye and movements so powerfully focused on sensations of shape and space and color.

Beauty is so elusive but I’m bent on finding it and pushing and squeezing and wrestling it into words. That sounds pretentious I know but that’s art anyone who sets out to make art is making an assumption about their capacity to make something beautiful or so astoundingly ugly it becomes beautiful and that smells of pretense. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most, if not all, enterprises involve pretense. Sea coasts are beautiful by default. There is so much complexity complexity of shape complexity of color complexity of organic and inorganic complexity of debris washed ashore complexity of birds complexity of mollusks complexity of shells complexity of fins and mouths and gills and sand and reflections on the sand when the waves move in and crash and slide over the sand and recede leaving that special shine. The puzzle of waves alone is fascinating. Hypnotic. The way they move what is a wave it is neither an object nor pure energy. It is momentum made visible. The energy of a wave moving is water moving the wave itself does not exist in the manner that a mirror or pillow or handsaw exists. Blood is real. I remember that scene in Castaway the one movie with Tom Hanks that I truly enjoy in which Hanks unsuccessfully puts himself to sea and capsizes and wades back and cuts himself on the coral. Ribbons of blood swirl out from his leg trailing behind him and I immediately thought: sharks. But he made it back and tended his wound and went on to construct another more workable raft, using the plastic siding of a porta-potty for a sail. Brilliant.

Construction is a mode of culmination. One begins with nails and wood and a spirit level and blueprint and bags of cement and a hose with access to water and one digs a hole and fills it with cement and birds fly overhead and there is sometimes a little friction a little confusion but one way or another the job gets done. Later some men enter a lobby and fall into conversation. Conversation is another form of construction. The nerves are alert to someone’s words and then one makes one’s own words and the emission creates another emission and sometimes there is deceit and sometimes there is honesty and most often there is a little of both. And someone always exclaims oh my god that’s true.

A mongrel barks at a shadow. The organic is made of the inorganic. Insults mean very little. Greed drives too much human behavior. We endeavor to be kind. We endeavor to further human understanding. We scrounge for food and shelter. We carve images of people and animals out of wood and stone and air. That which we carve out of air we call words. Nothing is impenetrable. Except, perhaps, the universe itself considered in its entirety.

I am, improbably, a collar stud. I hate anything vague. Sometimes there is a parable with a dachshund in it. Sometimes something thick like a word slaps my lip. It indicates alphabetical tinfoil, a collosal black quatrain beginning a mind of umbilical wax.

An expectation ignites the urge to write. But an expectation of what I cannot say. It is an enigma.

I vividly remember the jar full of thinner and paint brushes in my father’s studio in North Dakota, a bouquet of slender wooden handles and a fragrance of sharp acrid thinner. His brushes were always ready to paint. He’d pull one out, wipe the bristles with a rag, dip it in paint, and make a smear that he worked into a shape, an identity. It would happen so fast that I wondered if it didn’t have an existence before he gave it an existence.

Hair comes out of my head thread by thread but I can’t hear it as it does that. I smack my face with warm water in the bathroom sink. I would describe it as warm and wet. How else?

The bone at the center of my chest is a sternum. The center at the sternum of my chest is a bone. The chest at the sternum of my bone is a center. A center is always wide and steady. A center is always a bone.

One must garnish one’s spinning with the science of accentuation. There is a sheen on my shoes that jugs the strain of walking. A thought churns in my head until becomes many different thoughts. I am glossing nothing but the autonomy of shoes. I am Parisian. My shoes are insoluble and surly. My shoes are burnished structures in the dust of elopement. My shoes are violins. My legs are Apache. My feet are airplanes.

Will it rain today I don’t know. I live in a city where the flavor of mud is arranged by water rounded into sideboards and given virtuosity by the sheer magnitude of its prodigality. The heart is slippery with its attentions. Water generates so many shapes. So many shapes. So many shapes.

A tiger burns out of my mouth whenever I am in England and I lift my knife to get a pat of butter on it and bring it back and see that it is teeming with cod. Soft gentle meat of cod. All things in motion. All things straining to mean something. Meaning is the meat of the imagination. Meaning gives muscle to the brain. Meaning is hard to find. Meaning exists in multiple form. There is meaning in entertainment and meaning in rapiers and meaning out in the open. Out in the open. The world is a pumpernickel basketball. The sun burns down on it and erratic forms go into meaning in soft gentle abstraction. Dog rose in twilight gold.

Why Poetry Is Slender And Blue

I love being in motion. This is how we find precious metals. There are things in this world that elude our perception. One must adjust the seminal because it is effective and arrows thwack value to syntax as a form of sexual freight. Daub is just the weight of desire.

Parables help to discover that which is iridescent and beautiful. Mahogany and jellyfish. The monkeys of Madagascar. Nutmeg expands to include initiative and phantom trumpets of midnight jazz. Doctrines of silk encase the windows.

Hallucination acts as a mint to coin you. The sawdust has wings because the elevator insinuates desire. Bulbs demonstrate this with mania. Lucidity is the result of exzema and sticks. That the cocoon was baked in a pumpkin and hatched out of a face-lift means only that a doodle has fruit if the persuasion rouses flotsam and the creature in question is able to exist without the bias of preconceived ideas and feeds on the nectar of metaphor.

As for the farm, it was swallowed by a fish in the sky. All these words do is amble into morality. They do not bring the farm back. They can only allegorize the cathectic by filling in the cracks of each emotion with sand and lava. And this must occur when the number of heat particles hitting the sentence equal the number of heat particles leaving the sentence and are conducted into the brain by gleeful cells in teaberry reverie.

This is oblivion whispered in tin. My name is Percy Bysshe Shelley and I approve this message. The trapeze keeps swinging until it is pulled back by a man infatuated with gravity. This further induces the friction of interaction. For instance, there is an ocean talking to a cake on the other side of the casino which means that arms are whales of ancestral staircase.

Now roll the dice. This sexual sternum this consciousness washed with ideas of concord. This source of conifers. Conferences and shining. L’Estaque causes clarinets but it is not just trumpeted it is painted.

Think about that. Fierce feelings are there to join the paragraph in its infancy. This is how life becomes a secretion. Ink springs from the pen in a slide and generates Apollinaire. A flavor burning in the powder quickens the wrestlers into action.

Being balloons in dimes on the ceiling as a ball rolls into romance ravenous for virtue. This is its shadow widening into bleachers. Sometimes it is longer to stray from meaning than it is to embed some lines with gold. One way or another you hate to keep the tourists coming or the whole enterprise turns Mediterranean and oak. Plato plays badminton with Swinburne and convokes apparitions of flickering aggression that remind us all of the shuttlecock that is consequence and the fine solid particles of matter floating in interstellar space.

Chaos is expansive. Voices amplified by marble. Listening to one’s own emotions is everybody. Apples that voyage more iron than a spoon collect the pulse of the sun in boiling leaves. Cries of hirsute shorebird build into January or snicker into candy.

Peacocks explain the need for books behind the study. The pumpernickel falls into the sand and a sail spills wind into greyhounds. The lines around my eyes are protected by a copyright law, sings Mick Jagger. Should the map show fidelity to the ground yes certainly but it should also display grandeur. Time is nailed to space and there is a sea that describes this.
Many devices start by hope or turmoil. There is meaning in this and gurgling and parables. There is more lip than throat when a muscle sparkles. We are accentuated by constraint and atmosphere. It makes everything pink.

The scream dribbles out of a muscle and strays into ecstasy. There is such dripping soulfulness in the sound that we stand at the frontier of music. Sam and Dave sweating heavily in black pants and white shirts. The journey of life begins with soap and ends with kisses. The algebra of garments hanging from a peg creates a long blood and a bouncing knife.

The bugs are anomalies of the tide. The search for meaning begins with a convocation and strains to seclude Euclid’s eyeball in a summer resort. The neck is shrewdly designed to include a passage for coffee. Nouns smell of tea and barrel staves. This is why poetry is slender and blue and hammers its way through books in jaguars and brooks.