Ludwig Van Flintstoven

            On Sunday morning the thickest fog I’ve seen in years kept the city extra dark until well after sunrise which of course could not be seen through the fog.

            I’ve been listening to a lot of recordings of Leonard Cohen concerts. There’s one song he always played at his shows since the mid 70s, called “I Tried to Leave You”. He would play the song near the end of the night and in each of the recordings that I’ve heard, when he sings the lines, “Goodnight my darling, I hope you’re satisfied” the audience starts cheering.

            I finished reading “Types of Canadian Women” by K. I. Press and enjoyed it. I’ll bet she writes even better poems about herself though.

            I started reading Giovanna Riccio’s “Strong Bread” and found it to be a lot better than I expected. I’ve heard her read from her book about dolls but I didn’t find it to be as good. In this book when she writes about herself and I find it to be sensual, with often strong imagery. Some of the poems on other subjects are not bad, but not as good. Besides Albert Moritz, Giovanna is the only one of the poets I’ve read in this course that speaks to me by name. I’ll have to get her to autograph the book for me the next time I see her.

            I watched two episodes of Johnny Ringo. The first guest starred a young Burt Reynolds as a nasty character. Another character was shown to be an expert in the “ancient art of karate”. I guess karate was fairly new to TV audiences in 1955, since the writer of the story was a bit naïve about the discipline. The expert said that he had not yet achieved the black belt, which required the achievement of inner peace. Black belts in karate are pretty common now, even among eight year olds, but I doubt if most of those that earned them achieved much serenity beforehand.

            The second episode guest starred Martin Landau as a former alcoholic turned farmer who continued to have extremely bad circumstances in his life.

            The theme song for Johnny Ringo, written by the star of the show, Dan Durant, sounds a lot like a slowed down, twangy version of the Flintstones theme song that was written five years later. It looks like both songs take their melody from a section of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata number 17. I scanned it and you can sort of hear it in the middle, though the classical piece is a hell of a lot faster.