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More garden pictures. Of course, this is nothing compared to my neighbor's 2-acre plot, but I'm starting to get excited.
The Amazing Atomic Zucchini Plant
Sweet pepper:
More sweet peppers. I planted seven different kinds. I like peppers.
The big picture:
Since that day I first read
H.D., I tagged along behind her, wantonly blending her poetry with her
biography.
I wanted to jag from independence to romantic
thralldom, just as she did.
What abandoned lover would not want to emulate her Eurydice’s defiant
cry to Orpheus?
Before I am lost,
hell must open like a red
rose
for the dead to pass.
Eventually, I found H.D.’s
Hellenic range of aesthetics can sometimes seem a little narrow or awkward in
the modern era, but this was simply learning the limitations and humanity of a
friend you idolize at first meeting.
I could easily forgive the tendentiousness of her revisionary account of
the Trojan War, Helen in Egypt,
when I was in the midst of her expansive and iconoclastic Trilogy, arguably one of the few successful modernist long
poems. Even without Aliki
Barnstone’s wonderful edition (which wasn’t available when I first read it)
full of notes on H.D.’s references and allusions, the poem can be read simply
as a poet talking to poets about the power and responsibility found in
poetry--a power she believes in, even as the bombs of the Blitz are raining
down on her:
But we fight for life,
we fight, they say, for breath,
so what good are your scribblings?
this - we take them with us
beyond death…
In high school I became H.D. Or
at least her spirit inhabited mine as I read her out-loud to myself, sprawled
on the black beanbag chair in my room, heels dug into the deep, orange shag
carpeting as the lines poured through me.
Like her, I was interested in séances and other supernatural phenomena,
and so figured that the day she died (September 27, 1961) was right about the
time when I, at age three, had a fever that nearly killed me. I reasoned that when her spirit left
her body it found its way into mine, causing the fever. I wrote about this at prodigious length
in my diary.
Now I’ve found more sane
ways of channeling H.D. The poet
Ted Mathys and I have written a screenplay for a biopic of H.D. The whole
process made her more present than any séance ever could. The screenplay centers on her sessions with Freud at the dawn of World War II alternating with scenes of World
War I. Our story ends with her
writing the first part of Trilogy,
“The Walls Do Not Fall,” as the walls of her flat fall in
around her in
London. Of course we’ve already
cast it—Cate Blanchett as H.D., naturally, and Sean Penn as Pound. We’ve gotten honorable mention in a
couple of screenwriting contests, and some agents have been initially
interested, but it’s a tough sell.
After all, when you Google “H.D.” you get a whole lot about
Harley-Davidson and HDTV.
You can tell a lot about a poet by his or her first
loves as a reader of poetry, so by way of introduction I thought I’d recount my
first time reading a modern poet outside of Dr. Seuss, and describe my
subsequent obsession. I grew up in the
‘60s and ‘70s, in upstate New York, in a middle-class household devoid of
poetry. My father read Michener and
Ludlum, while my mother read Erma Bombeck and I’m OK, You’re OK. But, far
away, in the City (as we called New York), my great-aunt Leocadia adored poetry, as well as all the
arts. She had gone to Hunter College
just after the First World War and was what we called cultured; she even had,
my parents said, “real oil paintings” on her walls. Perusing the thin volumes lining her shelves when I was around
thirteen, I was drawn to the title Sea
Garden. I vaguely recalled from one
of my father’s out-loud New York Times
crossword sessions that H.D. was a poet’s abbreviated name. I opened to “Sea Rose”:
Rose, harsh
rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf…
This week we welcome Greg Hewett as our guest blogger. Greg is the author of four collections of poetry: The Eros Conspiracy, Red Suburb, To Collect the Flesh, and most recently, darkacre (Coffee House Press 2010). The recipient of Fulbright fellowships to Denmark and Norway, Hewett has also been a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in France, and is Associate Professor of English at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is currently revising a collaborative screenplay on the poet H.D. and a biography of the film noir actor Thomas Gomez.
Welcome, Greg.
-- sdh
The Astronomer
Before
I knew I couldn’t fly,
my father would bundle
my green corduroy coat
over my pajamas
and
take me into the January-cold front yard
to count the stars.
I leaned against him,
following
the
long arc of his arm
as he pointed up and up,
the stars springing from
his fingertips
to
spin hazily through the sweet smoke
of his pipe.
He named the
constellations, mispronouncing
words
he’d only read, not heard,
and said if he had a sextant
he’d teach me to
navigate
by
the night sky.
I knew if I let go of his arm
I would fall upward into
the heavens
and
soar, infinite as an angel,
Cassiopeia, Orion, Ursa Major
breaking
open beneath my belly.
My
sockless feet, frigid in their overshoes,
stood on tiptoe, but I did not quite
dare
to let go.
The
tweedy scratch of his jacket on my cheek
anchored me as sure as gravity
to him, the only solid
place
at the center of the universe.
for Joe Pinto, 1917-1982
Slumming has a fascinating history as a slang term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1839, it meant “passing bad money,” but by the 1880s, it had taken on its present-day denotation of visiting poor neighborhoods “esp. for charitable or philanthropic purposes.” I’m going to take issue with that part of the OED’s definition, the purpose.
To begin with, the illustrative quotation right next to it, from 1884, reads, “I am not one of those who have taken to ‘slumming’ as an amusement,“ suggesting an entirely different and uncharitable purpose: doing it for fun. Slumming has always seemed on its surface to be connected to class consciousness, like the reform-minded muckraking journalism of the Late Victorian period exposing corruption in high places, or like ecotourism today, but those are essentially documentary endeavors, interested in fact-finding and, for all their ideological overlays, open to new information.
Slumming, on the other hand, seeks thrills, not social change, and gets there by exploiting the existing social order. It’s only amusing to visit a slum if you can leave. The second illustrative quotation in the OED is from 1894: “Slumming had not become the fashion at that time of day,” and that one, too, emphasizes the superficiality of the act. “Fashion,” not philanthropy, is the prime motive here, which makes perfect sense going back to slumming’s earliest incarnation as slang for counterfeiting. The slummer pretends to be poor, but isn’t really. Both quotations suggest slumming is a counterfeit of caring about the economic misfortunes of others, a pose more attuned to Decadence than altruism.
Rolling Rock had its own brush with counterfeiting when Anheuser-Busch closed down the only factory this dive-bar staple had ever known, in Latrobe, PA, moved it to New Jersey, and tried to re-brand it as a “craft” beer. Obviously, its parent company missed the whole point of Rolling Rock, which was to get away (temporarily, at least) from one’s own status as an artisan cheese eater who listens to R.E.M.
Now there’s no reason to order Rolling Rock, nor is there a reason to go slumming. To paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have met the slum, and it is us.
Remember, the amusement value of slumming derives from the ability to leave. But those who ten or twenty years ago would have been upper-middle-class-bound are today not so sure about their financial destiny. Yeah, we’re in an economic recovery, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t believe it, nor does anybody else I speak with. My friends and neighbors want to be hopeful, but they express their optimism in quiet undertones that sound more like fear. This slump seems different, bigger, more serious, and deep, as in unfathomable. Only Washington and Wall Street
, with the Dow again springing above 10,000, cling to the delusion that we’re on the road to recovery. The rest of us see an economic house of cards that makes the corrugated tin shacks fringing the Nairobi dump look better built.
We spend more than we earn. Our country consumes more than it produces. Our planet is one giant maxed-out credit card, and the time is coming when even a $4 Rolling Rock won’t fit on it. That’s neither amusing nor fashionable. We’ll all be making home brews then, our hands banged up from digging ourselves out of debt.
Au revoir, Rolling Rock. Hello, ’33.
Satire amazes me with its
quickness on the uptake. No sooner had Arthurian legend started making the
rounds than Marie de France began collecting these oral tales and making fun of
them. Chaucer has the Knight’s tale, a Romance, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale, a
parody of a romance, cheek by jowl in the same book. Sarah Palin and Tina Fey
performed in near perfect synchronicity, as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
So what cocktail is the satire of a cocktail? I suppose the recipe would have to be the key—a skewed catalogue of mismatched ingredients. Catalogues are often sources of humor, sometimes without trying. Think of the annoyingly complete laying out of possibilities, grouped into sets and subsets of sets and subsets of subsets, that Aristotle did for rhetoric. (“So much for Kindness and Unkindness. Let us now consider Pity, asking ourselves what things excite pity, and for what persons, and in what states of our mind pity is felt.” p. 1396! As in, 1,395 previous pages of this stuff! Good grief!)
Okay, Cosmo drinkers out there, maybe I was a little hard on
you yesterday, with the hypocrisy comparison. I don’t want to get bonked on the
head with a Kate Spade bag the next time I step out, so I’ve chosen to feature
a cocktail nobody’s heard of, the Pain Killer.
It’s made with dark rum, pineapple
juice, coconut cream, nutmeg and orange juice, which makes it a natural for
drinkers who are underage, hung over, or hiding something under the cover of
strong fruity tastes. The Pain Killer is as shocked as his parole officer to
learn that, wow, there’s rum in this drink.
I propose that the pain being killed is the pain of discovery. Imagine how a banana feels, being peeled. Now imagine what happens if you peel a hypocrite, who offers a pretty juicy, irresistible, banana-like target. John Ensign, Eliot Spitzer, Roy Ashburn, these were media feeding frenzies for a reason. We love to watch hypocrisy get squeezed out of its sanctimonious rind, we have powerful urges to see it exposed, and every once in a while, we are gratified by a set of overwhelming facts, perhaps caught on video or confirmed by thousands, that comes along to slice right through that ignorant bliss. But unlike bananas, hypocrites don’t just sit there. They react, seeking to replace the discomfort of exposure with an artificial bliss induced by rum. Into this Pain Killer also go strained rationalizations, false apologies, and flat-out denial of the facts, no matter how glaring they are.
There is one other possibility: the honest confession.
I call this the Papaya Smoothie response. It is rarer, but a lot healthier. It
has no alcohol, for one thing, just lots of fruit with honey as a natural
sweetener, and it is the consistency of cheerfulness.
If you’ve ever listened
to public radio during a pledge drive, you might have noticed Ira Glass showing
off his knack for finding people who cheerfully admit their hypocrisy after it
is pointed out to them. This is no small thing. He gets people on the telephone
who are rumored to listen to NPR without donating to it. He asks them if,
indeed, the rumors are true. They groan or laugh and fess up. Then they write a
check. Cheerfully.
I’m no Ira Glass, having never found anyone who is cheerful during the pointing out process. I mostly find Pain Killer types, especially ones who rationalize. For example, a dear friend used to merge into an already crowded highway during morning rush hour like this: he’d stay in the merge lane until the last possible moment, until he was practically driving sideways on the concrete barrier, then he’d insert his car ahead of all those other cars patiently waiting their turn. We call this behavior Budging in Line, and it dovetails with hypocrisy’s penchant for holding others to standards (or traffic laws) it has no intention of following.
I discussed this driving behavior with my left-leaning force-for-good-in-the-world friend. What gives with the Budging? Does it not smack of thoughtlessly capitalistic, Me-First individualism? Apparently not, because he proceeded to deliver a dissertation on how his driving was serving the common good of the traffic—the only reason he cut in front of other cars was to do them a favor.
Our politicians are even less prone to cheerfulness when their hypocrisies are called out than my friend, but they’ve learned not to rationalize. Instead, they have press conferences, where they usually fail to apologize for being hypocrites, preferring to apologize for lesser and more flattering offenses: “mis-speaking” is popular, as is the offense of sticking to their principles when they should have caved in immediately to political expediency, or my favorite, just today, from oil industry cheerleader and Texas Republican Joe Barton, an apology for how other people misconstrued his deep sympathy and good heart in his earlier apology, which was to BP's Tony Hayward for "Obama's shakedown" of him. Barton went with “mis-speaking,” but credited it to someone else.
Confused? At least we don’t have to contemplate any powerful religious
institutions failing to face bald facts about the gap between what their
members do with what they preach. Whew! They’re way too busy excommunicating a nun at a Phoenix hospital for saving a woman’s life to have sexually
abused thousands of children they’ve suffered to come unto them. And even if
one or two clergymen were pedophiles—not that any are, I’m just sayin’—we all
know those poor, poor priests would be victims of “media frenzies” in a
“secular" age.
Dear Bleaders,
I didn't paint this picture, or hang it in a garage where the sunlight from a broken rafter might sometimes strike it just the way the light within the image was crashing onto this delightful nude, in skepsis. I just took the picture and uploaded it to you. Still, I'm feeling proud about it.
I've been talking with you about what we do, and how we choose it. I’ve suggested that powerful unseen influences are at work, sometimes in remarkably simple forms.
We engage in a kind of hypnotized copying of what we saw when we were growing up.
Let’s say, when you were growing up, mother was a in the kitchen all the time. Maybe you have a strong attitude about the kitchen now, you are cooking in it a lot, or avoiding it as if the oven door were the hot lower-lip of hell.
Either way, for you, try doing the kitchen actions, without cooking. Many projects are possible. Shrinky-dinks. Make clay objets d’art on the counter, use your rolling pin. Maybe make curls of hair with a grater. Did she work at the table? Then work at the table to finish your sculptures. Put them on baking trays and fire them in the oven. Remove them with your kitchen oven mitts, detray them with your spatula to a cookie-cooling rack.
Ever try working with Sculpey? It’s a plastic oven-bake clay, or so says the package. I found in the internest: “the best way to bake sculpey is to boil it”; thirty seconds in full boil and you are done. Now you can make the motions of dumpling-making and soup-concocting. Use the wooden spoon, pots like she used. You can even wear an apron.
You are copying every action your body recommends from memory, but you are not cooking. Do all the old moves, bend at the waist or whatever; was she always reading cookbooks as she worked? Well, get a guide book in there with you, run your staining finger down its quiet list of instructions, but make something that can’t be eaten. Eat before you start.
Say you had a father at the desk and now you are always at the desk, fine if you’re fine, but say you’re miserable. Note that the feeling of rightness that keeps you at the desk may not have anything to do with your chosen endeavor, but rather just the rightness of being at the desk. Don’t run away, well, run, yes, but not away. You know it was Frost who said, "The only way around is through." It's true.
Try redecorating your desk to look just like your father’s did, the clock, the lamp, the ink blotter with leather corners, the drawer with pens and paperclips. When it looks like his, his place of accounting, sit there and watercolor some careless flowers. Did he reach past these papers to make a note on those papers? Then you paint past your paper, onto the blotter, let the petal leaves extend across the wooden desk.
Or are you younger and your parent had a computer, writing books? You too could set yourself up just like him or her, without having to write a book. Acknowledge you were raised to feel comfortable sitting at a computer screen and moving your fingers. Perhaps you could learn the piano if you had a musical keyboard in front of a computer screen. Perhaps you could make those practicing appointments. But if you are going to change intent, bump up the quality of the copying. Think of how she dressed to sit in her office and write, think of the beverage situation, the gestures, the light. If they smoked try holding a toy pipe or letting a pretzel hang from your lips as you play, one eye squinting against its salty exhalations, more in the mind than the air.
The Cosmopolitan is the most hypocritical of cocktails. All Juicy Couture, with magenta sequins on the hip pocket and a heart over the "i," it is in reality a stealthy, dark, sleek, long-range, off-the-radar missile designed to get you bombed. You're drinking a vodka martini, folks, even though it doesn't taste like one. Don't kid yourselves.
But you do kid yourselves. You wouldn’t order one of these horrors if you weren’t trying to kid yourselves. You’d order a martini, preferably made with gin, which shouts itself out, not vodka, that trickster, and certainly not pink vodka, sweetened with Cointreau and—arghhh!—dressed up in cranberry juice. “You” in this case is the consumer. “You” in this case is also a hypocrite, if we take hypocrisy to be saying one thing (“I am not gay”) but doing another (soliciting sex from other guys in the men’s room). The Cosmo drinker’s hypocrisy is to say, “I am a nice girl. See my pretty drink?” but then, like her prototypes on Sex and the City, to get drunk and sleep with her unattractive divorce attorney.
The problem with Latin is that it sounds all egg-heady. Cocktails,
which could conceivably both have eggs in them and go to your head, nonetheless
rarely have egg-heady names. Would you raise a Pulchritude to your parched
lips? Nope, it’s an American Beauty. Sip
a Vehicle? Sorry, try a Sidecar.
Our Old English, Celtic and Anglo Saxon words just sound better to put in your
mouth. They’ve got chewier textures, a whiff of sensuality, the promise of
tasting good. Browse a bartending guide and you’ll find Fizzes, Flips and
Rickeys, Cobblers, Coolers and Kirs, Sours, Slings and Sledgehammers, Sharks,
Derbies, Zombies and Knickerbockers. But Latinate names? I count only five that
even come close.
The first two that spring to mind, Cosmopolitan and Metropolitan, are both from the Greek, -politan meaning citizenship, and the prefixes from words for world and city. The Cosmopolitan is the citizen of the world, the Metropolitan of the city. Greek, as we know, is not Latin, but these two words do sound a bit egg-heady, and so they share the problem of Latin, a disembodiment from the senses. Another candidate is the Ideal Cocktail, idea- again from the Greek word meaning to see, which implies that our ideals are more tangible than we think. Judge is Latinate, and there’s a Judge, Jr. cocktail—does that count? I don’t think so. The name is so clearly straining to convert the beverage into a person, and no matter how Latinate a person’s name, a person remains rooted in the body. Personification, an egg-heady word, trumps egg-headiness. Personification in fact does the opposite of how it sounds.
Here's the latest picture of my garden as it progresses. We've been having great growing weather - lots of sunshine during the day, rain in the late afternoon and evening. The thing with the giant leaves in the foreground is my atomic zucchini plant; thanks to Black Jack, it is taking on mythic proportions.
Tiny peppers are appearing on the pepper plants, and the cucumber is covered with blossoms. The only things that didn't come up were the snapdragons - oh well.
So far, marauders have stayed away, although I did catch a deer eyeing things and licking its chops the other day. Fortunately, it ran away when it saw me.
“Drill, baby, drill” is to slogans as Bull’s Blood is to
wine and “subprime” is to finance. A risky proposition. Duh. It says so right
there in the name. Who would care—or dare—to drink the blood of a bull?
The
same people who want to drill, baby, and who bet that “subprime” will suddenly
translate to “above par” as soon as they pour their money down that drain of
wishful thinking.
What is going on with these people? Don’t they know that “subprime” means “not good,” as in, “bad”? Or consider the similarly risky mortgages called “liar’s loans,” as if “subprime” might be a shade too subtle. Hell bent though it is on screaming toxicity, that name seems to have had no deterrent value to investors. To the contrary, it attracts them like a promise: the worse for you it sounds, the merrier will be its consumption.
I'm not entirely sure what to call this particular quality of delusion. Hypocrisy springs to mind. After all, the “Drill, baby drill!” folks like to preach personal responsibility without necessarily taking it. If you can’t find a job, it’s your own problem. You need to take personal responsibility, not government handouts. If you’ve got black skin and the sinking feeling that it’s hampered your progress through both corporate America and airport security, why, that means you’re not taking personal responsibility. It has nothing to do with discrimination. You lost your weekend home in the Hamptons betting on a “subprime” mortgage? WAIT A MINUTE! THAT’S NOT FAIR! I WANT MY MONEY BACK!
Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, is a one-man illustration of what happens when you adhere to high principles only when they don’t apply to you. From Andrew Leonard’s article at Salon.com, the headline read, “Bobby Jindal's oil spill crisis of faith,” and, below that, “The principled stimulus foe changes his mind about the evils of accepting government assistance.” The article detailed Jindal’s “principles,” which, as you might guess, involve personal responsibility when it comes to unionized auto workers in Detroit and homeowners in Nevada struggling with underwater mortgages. Contrast those deeply held principles to Jindal’s howls for federal help with his own state’s water problem.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
