A Sneak Preview

of a recent email interview of Sesshu Foster:

Me: Given that elephant seals are the marine descendants of bears, and manatees are descended from cows, and otters from foxes and sea lions from dogs, what are you doing to prepare for the inevitable human evolution into analogous pinniped form?

Sesshu Foster: To prepare for eventual evolution of humans into pinniped sea mammalians, I continue to walk in the rain every chance I get. Even in memory, you can find me walking around downtown Seattle in the pouring rain on First St. down to Pioneer Square and back to Pike Market, where there used to be a good bookstore, and it’s the same rain I was walking in in East L.A. in 1973 in army jacket thinking about the CIA supported military coup in Chile that resulted in 3,000 desaparecidos and I was walking the hills of East L.A. thinking about that as the Vietnam War ground on and on, and it was raining... it was raining... Not to mention all those years of rain in the Bay Area, San Francisco in the pouring rain... rain pouring into the Grand Canyon... the ancient rain, Bob Kaufman called it---the dry rain of photochemical particulate on Los Angeles sunsets expelled from my lungs in little Aztec plumes of breath. I swim in the rain behind my eyeballs. In the jails and on stairs to nowhere it rains, sometimes dry rain, sometimes rain of darkness. Sometimes rivers of dreaming.

In other news: Euro-komedy kontinues, as leaders of leading democracies are outraged by Greek leader's quasi-democratic gesture, and the Los Angeles Times reviews Ether.