Reading J.G. Ballard past few days of bad weather, strange dystopias written with a weird detachment. Remember back when we had a paper in '67 we called The Burning World Review after his title. Ballard's prose style has me looking back with a longish story about jealousy and its destructive qualities. In one Ballard story, The Garden of Time, an aristocratic couple is living out their last few treasured moments in their castle, as hordes of barbarians are approaching on the horizon. At same time (of reading Ballard) old pal Doubiago sent me a link with John Curl's Drop City memoir of days when that Trinidad, Colorado commune was the model for our own attempt in Placitas, named Drop South and later renamed Manera Nueva by Katona. Curl gets to the dropping of acid and the hilarity and strangeness of our out of the blue try for a utopia amid the ruins of Vietnam, Kennedy deaths, and a repudiation of the 50s world of our parents. Curl gives all the participants funny names which was common in those days; it was as if we were all becoming some kind of troupe of players with roles to entertain the survivors who somehow sped from the two coasts to start these ragtag but brilliantly imagined ideas that took the form of domes, zomes, bright acid dreams, astonishing sex amid the stars of the southwest, and a general plan of a counterculture that may have eventually burned out but was in our young visions something to invest every last desperate iota of ourselves.  A bit wistful rememberig it all, and what became of us, especially as the last few weeks have seen at least three friends die. Picture of Bill Dodd (which I got from Silliman) resounds with many days and bar nights with Bill, who always had a certain lofty style of his own. Poets will keep imagining worlds made up of mind, feeling, rhythmic phrasing that tries to find some passing meaning and perhaps beauty in this vanishing world. Still, one thinks, it is worth being here, celebrating, sitting here with the sun pouring through the morning window, a few birds on the make, a day breaking again into a whole unplanned possibility.