Sunset at St. Andrews

Zen and the Art of Divot Replacement

by James Boles

  

Golf is a powerful metaphor in my life and a complicated relationship. More than a game, sport or competition—at my best it is a meditation, but more often it devolves into a confrontation with my mental affliction—the wedge: scooping, decelerating short game.

The best driver of the ball you have ever seen…a streaky putter…but the short game is an affliction…Can you hold one thought, one swing, one shot in your mind from waggle to impact? Or will you succumb to the impact zone yips, the fatal chase move...but we are not discussing my swing flaw, or rather, my scoring flaw…

I have come to believe in the four noble truths;

and I play golf as a metaphor—a means to teach

an unmasterable game— enlightenment

The grounds for gauf

The rules of gauf

The true match

One swing, one shot

My teacher, a master of zen,

put it more eloquently when he told me,

“one shot to test your understanding,

and eighteen holes to polish the soul.”

I took up the game of golf faster than some, earlier than most but not all. It was the summer of my ninth year, when a friend up the street started taking golf lessons at the Dallas Country Club. He invited me out to the grounds of Dover Elementary School to demonstrate what he had learned, and together we fashioned a two-hole course between the baseball diamonds on the playing fields. My re-collection, is that I beat my friend with his own clubs, first time out­­ over that makeshift layout. The friendship did not survive that first match, but my passion for the game did.

Soon thereafter my family left Richardson, Texas, and moved overseas when my father accepted a European assignment with the Department of Army. Our family spent the next three years in Italy, just outside Livorno, port city to Florence and then two more in Heidelberg, Germany, headquarters of NATO High Command. Most of my summer weekends I spent on the golf course, either caddying for my father on one of his golfing trips to Punta Alla in Italy; or caddying for the generals in Heidelberg—lessons in how not to play the game.

When we got overseas, my father also took up golf. My father was not a very good golfer. He was a leftie, and so played the game from the other side of the ball at a time when there was only one lefty in the pros. When he was on he could drive the ball with power, but seldom did he have the accuracy to match his length. His touch around the greens could be quite abysmal as well, but he keep fidelity with the rules. He counted every stroke and never improved his lie.

It was an important lesson to me.

When I reached my middle years, a phase my wife claims began shortly after my 37^th birthdate and continued without cessation until the end of my fiftieth year, golf became a weekend obsession…an escape from the pressures of the job or lack of one, and tension in the family unit.

I was also trying to re-activate a writing career that had laid dormant too long. A novel had sprung into my head about the story of a half-black, Shinnecock caddie by the name of Jobe ‘one shot’ Shipman who carried the bag for eighteen Open winners.

january 21-22, 2012
arbor street
office of audioevolution, llc

Saturday, white morning written pages to the tune of a favorite concert (Koln concert by Keith Jarrett). All elements of the writer's trade at hand: smokes (though that must be done outside, and more on that later), music, the empty page and my fountation pen. Now, I could delay things immensely, as I used to in days past, to stop and take out my camera to show you pictures of all those elements, but is it not better that I leave it to your imagination.)

Words, words, words, the immortal character intones.

For him a mockery

For me an incantation

Interruption...

Off the shovel snow, and now the wife is gone. The house is mine.

Light them up. We will handle the storm of fury on her return. She is off to saturday sessions, listening to people. They share grief, pain, addiction, withheld feelings, hidden secrets, longings and desires whilst I grasp at

What is it that I grasp at?

Answers to unsolveable questions

forgiveness of past sins

the torments of personal failings

Scattered thoughts

a few gems to preserve on paper

while the rest sink like stones



first snow at Kilkare cottage

Looking out o'er the middle ocean
a three year hermitage
there were many words, words, words
written on the pages of the countless journals
Someday, soon I shall gather all the shards
and piece them back together
bind them, marry them
and it will be a song of creation
soon forgotten.

"Dissecting Gum" by Ariel

Post-Production by Jobe Jr.



*A commentary update from the audio publisher regarding A Disorder Peculiar to the Country


Monkey Mind*

 Update: January 19, 2012
It is my understanding that Ken Kalfus has been at work on a new novel. Of course, anyone in publishing already knows this, but this blog is not written for the likes of publishers marketplace and publishers weekly, but for the lonely audiophiles who straggle on to this site in the wee morning hours. The traffic that comes to this site is mostly myselfto write, my mother to see what else I might have said about her, or my father, sister, or nephew; and audiophiles. The confusion, audioevolution.com versus audioevolution.org.

"Audio Evolution,. heh that sounds cool, I need some new stereo equipment."__audiojoe

Original post March 2007

Ken Kalfus's post 9/11 novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country was a 2006 National Book Award nominee. A sly satire (dark) black comedy of war, terrorism and conjugal strife. Audiobook Details Author Interview

I first read this novel in manuscript when I was still the acquisitions director for Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC, now known as Macmillan Audio. Little did I know at the time how few the degrees of separation were between myself and the author, Ken Kalfus. I would come to find out later, that the book was dedicated (in part) to my wife's college roommate and that the two of them had attended NYU with the author. It is indeed "a small world after all." Published in contravention of all the accepted axioms of audio publishing (big first print, marketing budget and simultaneous with the hardcover). Why? Because: the novel spoke to me.

I found in it a voice that crystallized my inchoate concerns, thoughts and feelings post 9/11, especially about the direction the country was heading in its aftermath. As a nation, I believe that we responded to 9/11 with our collective hypothalamus, determined to avenge the stain upon our nation. We set reason aside, then our founding principles, and finally, our morality. There is nothing we have not sacrificed to achieve victory in the war on terror, nothing, not habeus corpus, due process, nor civil liberties. We sacrificed it all in an illusory quest, not for freedom from terror, but for freedom from the fear of terror. And all we have after four years and billions of dollars is more terror and more fear of terror as we sacrifice more and more of our freedoms. A black comedy, indeed.

taboo

Transcription from the black moleskin, "Dark Matters"

"the nymphet, now with a dash of Irish blood, was really much the same lass,... but otherwise the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel" - Vladimir Nabokov (1956)

He wrote his story, and then went to burn it as promised,
but the wife stopped him on the way to the incinerator
and saved the final copy.

Commentary:
(Deleted)
obliviously unaware,
of the cock of her hip
I transcribe immoral words
on the soft fold of her

shoulder,
(Yes, less offensive, shoulder.)

She casts a glance back
questioning
(an encantation)
then cast a spell.