The lost tapes of John Coltrane

From Portland, Oregon where last night around 11 p.m. I heard the sounds of a long shrill freight train whistle and an owl cooing collide at approximately the same time. I trust no one was hurt.

Portland, as far as I can tell, is equally a writer's city and a reader's city. It's a place where I can order an Oly ("It's the Water"") the first beer I ever drank, age 16, at Holman's on 28th and sit in Holman's garden with some smart people I've become friendly with here discussing the proper use of apostrophes. Wrapping my right hand around the cold Oly can, I pause to read the label: The Oly I remember of Tumwater, Washington is now owned by Pabst of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and contract brewed by MillerCoors in southern California. This cold fact breaks my heart.

There are still places in Portland where everyone you see looks like a writer, particularly in the vicinity of Mother Foucault's Bookshop, located on the border of Portland's inner southeast industrial district, wherever that is (523 SE Morrison St.) Mother F's just might be the Best Bookstore in the World for Writers and the Second Best for Readers: the author Thomas Fuller was seen there yesterday, pleased that two copies of his new novel The Classical World had been added to the collection, poking around the store for rare, possibly extinct volumes of Henry Miller and Edward Abbey.

It now being the age of writing contests and writerly award ceremonies with catagories in transgender poetry, metabolic fiction and early adult memoir, readers flock to Powell's City of Books (1005 W Burnside St.) where the corporate interests in literature are well served, along with carefully selected small press offerings from poets carefully selected by small press publishers. At Powell's everyone looks like a reader and not like a writer, though I suspect a writer infiltrates the Powell's crowd once in awhile if only to see what mostly mainstream best-selling fiction and non-fiction looks like. 

Leaving Mother Foucault's I was the fortunate recipient of an image of the late writer William Burroughs crossing Morrison St. after selling a grocery bag full of books to Greg the proprietor. Burroughs needs to fix and has the money to do so: the last I see of Burroughs he's disappearing into a small hotel around the corner. Leaving Powell's I have the thought of suggesting to the bookclub I belong to that we read Naked Lunch, though when I mention the suggestion to my mate she says, "Burroughs is a dead end."

This morning I read in The New York Times that they've found a cache of lost recordings made by John Coltrane in the early 1960's. I listen to one of them, "Slow Blues", while I write.

Writer and reader, author and publisher, listener and maker of strange unintelligble sounds, connoisseur of lost and found bins, an anonymous patron of the arts as seen the other day in Portland, Oregon.