I shore these pieces against the ruins of a world in motion
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The Dogs Bark, Capote's compilation of his travel pieces and personal sketches, was written across twenty plus years.  It is necessarily uneven.  The brief sketches of varying locales and locals gives the reader the  feelling of sitting at a wine tasting rather than an entire feast.  Some  pieces have tremendous body; still you are only allowed a nip of each.  The travel pieces and brief sketches, especially those of persons in the  post WWII era, are interesting as a fleeting view of alien people in closed  cultures that no longer exist--Europeans in French Tunisia, Capote living  in the old Quarter of New Orleans, the cast of the african-american musical  "Porgy and Bess" in Soviet Russia, etc.  Depending on your  personal opinion of Capote's opinion of himself (he is the traveler at the  center of the travel pieces, after all), some works are more enjoyable than  others.  Some readers will find his innumerable digs at the drabness of  Soviet life in "The Muses are Heard" wickedly funny; others will  be annoyed  that he couldn't disengage his own sense of disenchantment to  take a more objectively journalistic viewpoint.  If you're considering this  book, you are more than likely a member of the first camp.  The avid  Capote reader will find intriguing parallels and connections between the  people he encounters in his travels and  characters in his fictional works.  Others will enjoy the works for their strengths as travel logs--the  transparent eyeball of the traveler bringing terra incognita into sharp  focus through well-described event and emotion.  Skip back and forth  through the book; savor the variety.
193521
The first day I used it at the beach the surface material has a few small chunks of foam missing, probably from the ring I was wearing while body surfing. I know now that the material can not stand up to such use.
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I had to take the parts apart and use part of the ones that I took off. the direction of travel was backwards.
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Glide slides at the limit and I'm still holding...

From the deserts of Sudan to the gardens of Japan, from Milan to Yucatan, every shoe for every man.
In the wilds of Borneo and the vineyards of Bordeaux, Eskimo, Arapaho, love these shoes and have to go.
In the dock of Tiger Bay, on the road to Mandalay, from Bombay to Santa F, o'er the hills and far away.
Hit me with your Mush Atoll, hit me, hit me
Hit me your Mush Atoll, hit me, hit me
Je t'adore, ich liebe dich, hit me, hit me, hit me
Hit me with your Mush Atoll
Hit me slowly, hit me quick
Hit me, hit me, hit me
194859
The bottom is a little bit tough, makes me feel like I stand on the rock, just so so.
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They are pretty, but I have broken more of these than I have finished, and broke the ones that I finished.
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Oftentimes, when the worst happens somewhere in the world, especially to people that you do not know, it is hard to know what to do about it. I have felt this way, watching from afar the earthquakes, floods, storms, tsunamis that seem to have been raining down like frogs in recent years. Sure, there are many avenues for making donations, online and with your cell phone, but when an opportunity appeared to use my creativity in support of relief for the people of Japan, I took it. I am one of the authors of the stories in this anthology, and let me tell you that it is an honor to be published alongside these other accomplished and skilled writers.

By purchasing this anthology, you will do more than just contribute to the relief efforts in Sendai; you will be able to experience how a community of writers each responded to the tragedy, how each of us reflected and responded, and how we put our hearts and souls into writing short stories that might cumulatively make a difference.

Thank you for giving Stories for Sendai a chance!
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One of my first projects as a Jewish museum worker was to get out the p.r. for an exhibition of many of these photographs. Seeing them for the first time--or the twentieth--was stunning. Indeed, they evoked a vanished world--and the sense of the human lives and connections living there and then. You will want to look through these photos many, many times, and you'll not forget them.
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The crashes of the waves are a little more dramatic and loud than I had expected.  Just get about to sleep and BOOM another crashing wave.
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I have spent untold amounts of time staring at 2 of these side by side, and am doing so now,and will continue to do so untill they burn out most likely.
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Nice rocks but I feel like I got the scraps or the leftovers from whatever they had left.  On the main rock theres a huge line on the good side of the rock possibly from trying to cut it into multiple pieces.
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Unfirtunately, the items I bought came unfinished and material needed to finish them is missing. I will also have to cut them into shape, for which I do not have the right equipment to have a finished good worth showing in my walls.
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Beautiful, but the surface has become a little rough. I haven't exposed it to water, so not really sure why...
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By far the crowning of T.S. Eliot's poetry. The evanescent equilibrium point between a whole set of couples of antagons. The present is such a point, but demultiplied by a myriad of other couples. Past-Future, Has-been-Might-have-been, and this point is movement, constantly moving between those antagons. It gives you a vertigo, the vertigo we feel in front of the present that is a constantly moving equilibrium point. Fascinating. Men are no longer hollow but they are unstoppable motion. They are some light, fine and fuzzy moving line between all the antagons of human nature, of nature as for that. Then a long and rich metaphor of life with the sea, neverending movement that ignores past and future but is pure present and nothing else. Men and women can only worship this everlasting  present motion, time and place that is no time, no place and no motion, just unstable energy burnt in its own existence.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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I've admired this art/map for years in various shops on our cruising journeys and finally found the right wall for it.  It's great to see the bottom contours and on land the roads and many familiar places.  Queues lovely memories every time I look at it.
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Beginning in 1693, the new continent of North America, the rush to tame a wilderness, capture the resources, greed driven destruction of forests, suppression or extermination of the native inhabitants, this in a land that today sees demonstrations, pro and con, on behalf of non-native would be citizens.  And the pointing of fingers and more demonstrations on behalf of a planet being deprived of life giving resources, forests.  As a youth, I once lived where small family logging operations were common.  I spent hours in my much beloved forests, marveling at the beauty of life but also seeking solitude.  Watching men and machines harvest the trees, steam engine driven saws, a team of oxen brought to the scene to rescue a mired Caterpillar tractor and I thought of the vastness of the forest and its inexhaustible supply of timber, the sawmills roughing the logs, the outer parts of the logs sold as slab wood by the truckload while the semi-finished logs were trucked away for further processing.  Trees I considered beautiful cut down and gone, replaced naturally by new trees, suckers growing from the stumps, now three or four trees from the suckers where once there was but a single tree.  In my small world, the forest was so vast I saw no harm.  The author has copied my small world and magnified it to show what was really happening in this new world.  Vast forests destroyed, lumber harvested ruthlessly by greed, thousands of acres set afire to clear the land, trees that were a hundred of years old gone.  Native inhabitants considered little more than pestilence, used as fodder for the more dangerous work as their environment was destroyed.  Thievery as trees were poached from remote sites, there were no drones or other flying machines to monitor owner property.  The author weaves all these small scenes into the big picture, every tree destroyed having an impact on the environment, one less air purifier as air pollution itself increased from burning waste.  Hill sides stripped bare sliding into rivers.  Follow the news casts for one year in California, as wild fires consume growth followed by drenching rains carrying land with the houses and inhabitants into flood of mud.  While the story does follow some families and people, after all the very destruction is caused by people.  As the story progresses it becomes apparent the world climate is changing.  Subtract some trees add some population.  Air purifiers disappearing, polluting agents filling the void.  This is happening the world over, Indonesia being stripped of the rainforest, greed driven, indigenous people displaced, deprived of their livelihood.  Same story in the Amazonian rain forest.  Nature is plagued with such creatures as Gypsy Moths, Wooly Adelgids, or Pine Bark Beetles.  Nature recovers.  Nature is plagued by man. Nature does not recover.  Mankind loses.  An eye-opening account of the past, present and continuing destruction of our planet.  We only have this one planet.  This book should be required reading in schools, the impact of the story impressed on any future generations, lessons learned but seemingly unheeded.  Five stars and more if I could alter the rating system.
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Alan Shapiro has, in this volume, created a world where, for better or for worse, the past is not missing: instead, it walks around in our world, befriending us or pestering us, stopping at nothing, even death.  And yet these are poems of loss, or loss that will not complete itself, as in Joyce's "absence is the highest form of presence."
Take the poem "Ghost," in which a dead woman speaks to her widower: even the past is haunted by its own past.  Or the poems of or to the speaker's dead or dying relatives & loved ones: the touches that have ended in withdrawn hands but remain in lingering feeling.
Shapiro's knowledge of poetry is astounding, & he uses that knowledge (which is, by the way, so much more than mere knowledge) to build subtle, strong, and elegant poetry.  He has been doing it for years; his earlier work--excellent as it is--is mere exercize for the power of The Dead Alive and Busy.