photo courtesy Harry Dodge

1. I want now to investigate bonkers (a word that strikes me as germane to our times), but the word busted (also a fine word) keeps popping into my head. Not at all interchangeable, busted suggests mechanicity and palpability while bonkers seems to indicate something mental and systemic. But they inhabit the same register; both words are punchy (is that a register or a tone?) and both words suggest mitigatability—they’re carrying little hope suitcases. Do you feel that? I wrote the word busted the other day to describe birds I saw in a book of photographs, impossibly bent-up birds captured during liftoff, during landing—weird contorted flight surfaces, tangled wings like flat hands, ruddering volte-face, cartoony dustups apparently necessary to occasion real-life avian landings. I like the word busted—not shattered, not completely demolished. BUSTED!, as in currently unusable: an ugly leg thrown out of the tub too wounded even to soak. But you know what? I’m a repairman. I’m a research assistant! Give me what is busted and I’ll take a look. Here. See how in the break or the torn area, let’s call it the rupture, something truly bent or baffling is sometimes lined with an undeniably fecund matrix, raw lamina where new stuff is now compelled to grow? Read More