Author Archives: Ben

Farrah Fawcett and Grilled Spaghetti Sauce

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

Farrah smelled like trees.

If you’re a male heterosexual and the same age as I am, you knew that the most important attribute a prospective childhood friend could boast were parents who sprung not just for cable, but for one or more of the handful of premium movie channels that ran rated-R movies. My parents wouldn’t pay for cable, much less HBO, so I had to seek out bad words and boobs.

The Cannonball Run was not rated R so the most it showed were nipples outlined through thin shirts, but my parent’s inconsistent puritan streak got wind of inuendo in the film so I wasn’t allowed to see it in the theaters no matter how many times I told them that Bernard’s and Tony’s parents let them go. Thankfully Tony’s parents didn’t talk to my parents about such things so one night at a sleepover at his house I got to watch it on the same TV set that would later find fame as the giver of Purple Rain.

Looking back through my now-older eyes, I have to say that it’s a fantastic movie. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 29% from reviewers. No surprise there. It was always a proud bridge and tunnel set movie. What’s surprising is that Cannonball got made at all.

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POETS Day! Thanks for God, Girls, and Growing Old

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

There’s no need for a traditional POETS Day this week. “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” doesn’t really resonate when so many have a long Thanksgiving weekend anyway. Maybe “Pig Out, Enjoy Tryptophan Slumber?”

I’m phoning this one in myself. I’ve got potatoes dauphinoise (Not potatoes Lyonnaise!) to make and since no one else eats or cares about string bean casserole but me, I have to make that too. “Have to,” is misleading. It is necessary that I cook because I told people that I’d be contributing the potatoes, but “have to” makes it sound like a chore. It isn’t. I like spending time in the kitchen.

It’s like this column. I don’t have to write it, but I like doing so. Two years ago, I started this weekly for OT with a smirk, a silly acronym I picked up from a Scottish detective novel, and a nagging suspicion that poetry was not as much an ivory tower property as it’s considered.

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POETS Day! Thumbing Through Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934-1952

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Attribution: Dylan Thomas’s Writing Shed by John M

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

Happy POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work as early as you can and steal a few hours of a weekend that’s never long enough to begin with. Next week’s taken care of because of Pilgrims. Happy Thanksgiving long weekend to come, by the way. This Friday can be a half holiday of your own making should you accept the mission.

Daylight Savings has put the crunch on a lot of POETS Day activities. Indoor stuff makes more sense. You can still skip out of work and go to the park, but it gets dark around 2:15 so watch out for muggers and if you plan to be outside, save some daylight for a little verse. You’ll thank yourself.

***

My biggest problem with Dylan Thomas is that I keep calling him Dylan Harris.

Darren Harris was a guy I went to high school with. That’s where the confusion comes from. I didn’t know him very well; nice guy, we spoke at parties. His name sticks in my head because I heard a story about him a few years ago. He was involved in the student productions at Princeton when Roberta Flack held a concert there. She was so impressed with his management of the operation that she told him to get in touch after graduation. Eventually he became her manager.

I won’t vouch for any of that. He was a few years younger than I was, but I do remember hearing he got into Princeton. I don’t know if he was involved in productions, if he ever worked for Roberta Flack, or if she ever played an Ivy, much less Princeton. But I like the story and hope it’s true. I also hope he had a “Now that’s impossible,” Kramer to Bette Midler moment.

He was a nice guy; funny, too. The problem isn’t that Dylan Thomas brings up bad memories of Darren Harris. Not at all. I just keep saying the wrong name and feel like I should have worried grandchildren exchanging glances they don’t think I can see and wondering if it’s time for the talk.

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Thanks, Jimbo. Money’s on the Nightstand.

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

After the disappointing Sumlin administration, Texas A&M decided it so loved Jimbo Fisher they paid Florida State $7 million to disentangle him from that university so they could entangle him with a ten-year contract worth $75 million of their own. After holding par for two years with the 8-5 – plus or minus one – rut A&M nurtured into a comfortable groove, Fisher led the Aggies to a remarkable 9-1 2020 record in the all-SEC schedule gauntlet COVID year. The powers that be decided they loved Jimbo $1.5 million a year more that day than yesterday. A Gene Stallings-less (I maintain he would have known better) Board of Regents upped the contract to ninety-five point six million dollars effective January I, 2022.

It didn’t work out. Winning became a problem, but under Fisher A&M was able to assemble talent. So much so that Lane Kiffin, college football’s equivalent of the intellectual dark web, pointed out how great recruiting classes were at A&M while making sure to hint that Fisher’s done less with more and, in this age when buying players is a-okay as long as you have a plausible money laundering Name, Image, and Likeness story handy, that it was cash and not the coach that brought the five stars to College Station.

“I don’t know how you collect much better. So, congratulations to their group that collected these guys,” Kiffin said at a press conference the Monday before playing Fisher and A&M. Kiffin is good at twisting knives. Blake Toppmeyer wrote in USA Today last week, “Just when I thought Kiffin might be finished dunking on Fisher, he hung on the rim.” After the “collected” comment, someone asked the Ole Miss coach if the team or fans might rally around a coach having a rough time of it.

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POETS Day! William Empson’s “Aubade”

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

I went a little long on the poem this week, so I’m shirking the POETS Day intro. I suppose I could claim that I’m taking a POETS Day myself even though I’m writing on a Thursday so it would technically be a POETF Day. I’m not going to dwell on it.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I trust you all to inspire yourselves, to find a reason to get out of works before the man says it’s time to go. Have a good time and enjoy an early weekend.

***

“And, if I publish a volume of verse with notes longer than the text, as I want to do, will that be a prose work or a verse one? I ask out of curiosity, you understand…”
– William Empson in a letter to his publisher, c. 1930

William Empson was one of the most respected critics of poetry of the 20th Century. He was also a poet, though when reading commentary on his verse there’s often an unspoken, in some cases spoken but in very polite whispers, understanding that we read his poetry because of his criticism. It’s acknowledged that his poetry is technically brilliant but often spoken of as if he were writing to a formula or a unique talent for spotting errors or flourishes in others worked as a constraint when he composed; proper installation at odds with inspiration or something.

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POETS Day! Amy Lowell

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MS Lowell 62 (5), Houghton Library, Harvard University

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

Welcome once again to POETS Day, that wonderous day where we do our best to usher in the weekend, Henry Ford’s greatest creation, a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will.

I’ll be getting ready to watch football. A sizable chunk of our family’s Louisiana contingent Pissed Off Early this weekend to come join us in Birmingham for the Alabama/LSU game. Both teams have issues this year so it’s a coin flip as to who’s going to win but we’ve been getting together for this game long enough for me to know that if LSU loses it will be because of a missed holding, pass interference, or face masking call. It always is.

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POETS Day! Henry Vaughan and The Yellow King

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

I started watching True Detective on Max a few weeks ago. I remember reading about the show when it came out in 2014. It was supposed to have all manner of Easter eggs from supernatural horror works. One article made a big deal about references to The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers so I bought that book as a $0.99 Kindle download and promptly forgot about it. I read that Chambers was a big influence on Lovecraft whose complete works I had downloaded for a buck or two some long time before and never read, but I’ve read all the Sandman comics and played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons so at the very least something influenced by the same authors who were influences on the authors of some other stuff I liked was the sort of thing I was interested in being interested in. I promptly forgot about the show.

A Lincoln commercial with Matthew McConaughey aired during College Gameday a few weeks ago and I had an “Oh, Yeah!” moment. It was worth the wait. McConaughey and Harrelson are really good, delivering lines that could have gone off the rails if played wrong. There was one moment where Harrelson’s character watched a gruesome video of a crime and awkwardly has to shout “No!” It didn’t work, didn’t fit the character, and broke what should have been a pivotal moment, but I’m not sure what else he could have done with the line as written. In fact, it highlighted what a hard job the two leads had.

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POETS Day! Fourteeners

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

I was talking about the POETS Day, “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday,” ethos with somebody the other day and she brought up the French and their four-day thirty-five-hour work week as aspirational for the movement. I’m not certain the French four-day work week exists even in the tiny corners of their economy where I suspect it would make its home.

Between headlines about French youth rioting because they won’t get to retire at forty-whatever there are conflicting accounts of what constitutes a job over there. Forbes tells us “France famously has a legally mandated 35-hour work week, enshrined in law since 2000,” but in the Snippets of Paris article “France’s famous Myth: the 35-hour French Work Week” (parsing the capitalization decisions in that headline will keep me up for days) we’re asked “Think the French only work 35 hours a week? Perhaps the French are just not good at keeping track of their hours.”

Whether they do, whether they don’t is unimportant. My well-meaning friend misses the point of POETS Day. It’s not about accumulating time off. It’s about enjoying something illicit.

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The New New The New Criterion Is Here

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I just got my October issue of The New Criterion. The magazine usually comes right before the beginning of the listed month, but this go round it didn’t. September passed and each October day as my wife and I ended our walk with a mailbox check I’ve made the same stupid semi-joke wondering if my “trending towards old Criterion” had arrived.

I’m not sure if the one I got today is the one I was wondering about. If you don’t get your copy, or if your copy is damaged, they have a number you can call “within 90 days of issue date for a replacement copy.” I only called two days ago and they told me to allow one to two weeks for delivery so this may be a lickity-quick replacement or a foot dragging original. Either way, I have another copy out there.

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POETS Day! Emily Dickinson, The Myth [Updated!]

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

Baseball is over for the year. They’re still playing games, but don’t let that fool you. In a particularly cruel twist of plot the Orioles went down in three straight after coaxing long suffering fans into a state of disarmed expectation. Was it better than the old days where we would enjoy a few games at the beginning of the season but tinge that enjoyment with guarded detachment expecting we’d be mathematically eliminated from the postseason by the end of April?

At least knowing meant a stress-free summer. This year was hectic. I had to check standings a lot. Did you know there’s a team called The Devil Rays?

I guess you can call a POETS Day. I don’t know what you’ll do, though. Disillusioned baseball fan grousing period length is dictated by local custom but outside of the Pacific Northwest it’s at least a week so you’ll probably just lay around and eat Wheat Thins. Give it a shot if you want. Get out of work and try jumpstarting the weekend. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but you can sit around and do nothing at work too.

I don’t care. Either way, try reading a little verse. It can make things better or worse, depending on what you pick. A vector is a vector.

Also, I told you so.

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