Author Archives: Ben

Recipe: Deconstructed Salisbury Steak

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Eat the muscle pulp of lean beef made into cakes and broiled. This pulp should be as free as possible from connective or glue tissue, fat and cartilage…..The pulp should not be pressed too firmly together before broiling, or it will taste livery. Simply press it sufficiently to hold it together. Make the cakes from half an inch to an inch thick. Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire free from blaze and smoke. When cooked, put it on a hot plate and season to taste with butter, pepper, salt; also use either Worcestershire or Halford sauce, mustard, horseradish or lemon juice on the meat if desired.”
– Dr. James Henry Salisbury (1823-1905)

Don’t do that.

Before Bob Atkins, there was James Henry Salisbury. He got lost in the Victorian Era nutritionist craze. John Harvey Kellog promoted a vegetarian, cereal-heavy diet supplemented by yogurt enemas. Sylvester Graham made people sleep on hard beds, take cold baths, and lie about masturbating. Those were the heavy hitters. It was a fascinating time peopled by fascinating people.

As with Kellog, Salisbury was an early voice suggesting germs had a part in sickness and infections. He got made fun of a good bit for that before being proven right. Both men probably got away with a lot of crackpottery after that. Salisbury promoted a diet of beef cakes as described above, three times a day washed down with hot water. Why hot I’m unsure, but he warned against ever drinking other liquids at other temperatures. Fruits and vegetables were chock full of poisons and the cause of “summer complaints.” Pace Kellog and Graham, plants were relegated to a rounding error; no more than one percent of the Salisbury diet.

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POETS Day: Crow, by Ted Hughes

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The NFL season is over. College (real) football is self-immolating, buying and transferring talent as teams vie for one of the fitty-leven shiny new slots or the inevitable newer ones in the regular season diffusing expansion of the playoffs. Half the teams in the NBA make their playoffs, so there’s no point in watching that feigned drama. College basketball was visionary. They shed non-March interest long ago, and even that doesn’t kick in until post Ides. European soccer is in stasis. The beginning of the season is exciting. The cutthroat ending is exciting. What happens now won’t matter for a while.

Thank God for baseball. Spring training is here, consequence free but heraldic. I put on the Dodgers at the Padres yesterday. Didn’t even watch it. Just background. Baseball’s magic that way. It’s a comforting presence in an uncertain world. Today, I think I’ll put on KC v Texas. The big prize is tomorrow: Red Sox at Orioles. I’ll have a hard time not watching that.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of work a few hours ahead of schedule and ignore a ball game. First pitch at 2:05 Central. Happy POETS Day.

***

You’d think the most interesting thing about one of Great Britain’s Poet Laureates would be his poetry, but Ted Hughes first wife killed herself. She turned on an unlit oven and passed. At the time of her suicide, Hughes had moved out and was living with another woman. He would continue living with the other woman until six years later when she too killed herself; also by turning on an unlit oven.

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POETS Day! Hartley Coleridge

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He looks okay to me. Tiny hands, maybe.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

My kids are out of school again today. This is becoming a regular thing. There have been holidays, teacher workdays, snow days, bad weather forecast days, and one power outage. It’s gotten out of hand. They’re off Monday too.

Part of this can be put down to the extended school year. Back in my day, school ended on Memorial Day and didn’t pick up again until Labor Day. Elementary school kids knew a freedom more expansive than their concept of time passage. Middle schoolers re-invented themselves, returning in the fall with a deeper voice and a few Led Zeppelin t-shirts. High school kids got jobs, went to science camp, or rehab. There was time to know an unshared existence.

The Germans may have lost the war, but they also lost the next war. After beating them twice, the rest of the Western world carried on their loser Prussian school system as if nothing had happened. Fredrick gave the Generallandschulreglement, and we still march on. Der Realschule is never satisfied. It wants year-round classes.

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POETS Day! More Seamus Heaney and Thoughts on Touching Stuff

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Seamus Heaney

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Last week’s POETS Day was about Seamus Heaney, and I seemed to have found myself in a moment, albeit a miniscule one. Douglas Murray featured Heaney in his regular Sunday column, “Things Worth Remembering,” over at The Free Press and then the latest issue of The New Criterion arrived with a review by Paul Dean of both The Letter’s of Seamus Heaney and The Translations of Seamus Heaney. I got swept up in it all and the books I borrowed aren’t due back until the day before Valentine’s, so l’m going to keep it going.

I’m pulled by the urge to say “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s…” and then substitute something about the Super Bowl for the usual “Saturday,” but I’d have to include “Bowl.” It’s not POETSB Day. I can’t write “Super bowl” to de-emphasize half of what is a well-known proper title, and even if I did, it looks stupid. I’ll keep it “Saturday” and assume you know the drill. I’ll stay away from Taylor Swift cracks too.

***

My wife and I, weather permitting, try to walk every day along the creek that runs near our house. Today I was telling her about Heaney, what I’d read that afternoon. He left a sizable collection of literary papers and works to Emory University. They have his along with collections from other Irish poets: Yeats, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, and others. That’s about a two-hour drive from Birmingham and I was thinking maybe we’d take a day trip. And then I thought, “Why?”

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POETS Day! Listening to Seamus Heaney

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As always, it’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but this week you may not have piss off quite as early. I’m not suggesting you stay at work. Don’t do that. Get the weekend started early as per usual, but today we have an audio component. If you have a cushy desk job and a pair of earbuds, you can take time for a little verse right there in the discomfort of your cubicle.

Some may say, “Listening to non-work-related material on company time is like stealing!”

Yes, it is. Delicious stealing.

***

Harold Bloom wrote about everybody. As editor of the Modern Critical Views series, he got his name on a mess of book spines. They’re essay collections, and a hell of a resource – each focused on a particular author or movement and each with an erudite introduction by Bloom himself. A quick count on Goodreads shows one hundred and seventy-nine volumes dedicated to individual authors. There’s not a decent cover amongst them.

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POETS Day! Vita Sackville-West

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Veda Sealbinder Bonds and Vita Sackville-West were not alike. One was an award-winning poet who had lady sex with Virginia Woolf and the other was a put-upon innocent who made do speaking with only her tongue and lips as her jaw was clenched rictus fast when she said things like “Yew liddle brayats!”

They inhabit the same rhythmic space despite Veda bringing an extra syllable along for the ride. The -er in Sealbinder is nearly dropped and the -ville in Sackville is drawn out so they’re exchangeable timing wise. I wish I could say that Sealbinder is a dactyl substitution but I always over think feet. Veda Sealbinder Bonds could be trochees followed by an iamb? It’s enough to say that if you were writing a song about Vita and suddenly roved an eye toward Veda, an eraser’s all you’d need. Three stresses and the song remains the same. I think of one and the other comes along mnemonically.

Two friends in seventh grade scoured the phone book for strange names, and poor Veda’s made them laugh. For a decent chunk of 1984 or 85 she was subject to increasingly elaborate though decreasingly coherent prank calls with a giggling chorus of their fellows listening in on other phones throughout the house. Her name was so funny to us.

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POETS Day! My Problems with Walt Whitman

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I live in a city that is not prepared for cold weather. My northerly relatives laugh when we shut down for snow or icy conditions but we don’t have all the toys they have. If these were regular enough occurrences to justify a snowplow corps or whatever you call the truck that salts the road, we’d have one. But they aren’t. So we don’t. Or maybe we wouldn’t.

The truth is, we like the snow days – “snow days” being a catch all for any day off due to snow, freezing rain, or because James Spann or one of the lesser weatherfolks says there might be snow or freezing rain. Nobody can get to work except the people who own a liquor store and everybody can get to the liquor store. Kids, in particular, love snow days. Every so often we get a real event where cars are abandoned on highways and schools have to host impromptu sleep overs in the gym. Those are important because they give cover when the county preemptively calls a for closings when the weather forecast indicates the chance of something threatening and everybody wants a day off to go to the liquor store. “Better safe that sorry,” says the thirsty school board.

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Unprovoked Rant

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I’m reading A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding and Robert Graves. This struck me:

“Yet the sonnet theory can be provoked in Shakespeare’s sonnets as all pre-Shakespearian dramatic theories can be provoked in his plays.”

The sentence is in service of the authors view that it’s not enough to present as evidence of experimentation an excellent poem as excellent poems may have in them borrowings as well as innovations. I very much liked the use of “provoked.”

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POETS Day! John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

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I started POETS Day with the Idea that there’s a roguishness to poets that pairs well with the modern end of workweek encouragement to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I see them as day seizers.

They aren’t all outwardly roguish. It’s hard to imagine T.S. Eliot or Christina Rossetti so much as swiping a cookie, but I’m sure they had a mischievous side. Even poet by night and brisk morning walk to work/insurance agency vice president by day, Wallace Stevens, got rambunctious enough for Hemingway to punch, and he lived in Connecticut. They all have shades of misbehavior in them.

I think of them as blends, taking on, to degrees of little or lots depending on the poet, traits of three archetypes.

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Processing Loss

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Let me just say this. My next stop, you know where Lake Burton is, in north Georgia, right on the North Carolina border, Rabun County, it’s a lake, where they made Deliverance, if you ever saw the movie. That’s where I go in the summertime. That’s where I like it. That’s my next stop.
– Coach Nick Saban, Introductory Press Conference at The University of Alabama, January 4, 2007

Collette Connell went national when on January 3, 2007, she kissed newly-announced Alabama head coach Nick Saban on his arrival at the Tuscaloosa airport. She went for the mouth, but he made his name as a defensive coach and he was quick. She only got cheek. Unfortunately for Collette, the cops were quick too. They got her for a DUI later that day. Her smiling mugshot went national as well.

Before getting pulled over, she hopped around in front of a Fox 6 camera. “We ballin’! We ballin’!” she hollered. Ineloquent – sloppy really – but she spoke for a lot of people.

I think you have to live here for a while to understand how Alabamians feel about college football. Before he went national, Paul Finebaum was a local reporter and later radio personality in Birmingham. I remember listening to his show years ago during March Madness. It was down to a few teams, maybe the Elite Eight, and Paul had taken a few calls about Duke or whoever was expected to win it all. The next caller up started full of vinegar with, “I thought this was supposed to be a sports show, Paul! All this basketball and tournament nonsense and you ain’t said nothing about football. Spring practice started today!” He wasn’t being sarcastic. He meant it. I was nodding along as I drove, but I’ve had early summer arguments about who should be the backup free safety so what he said made sense to me.

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