Author Archives: Ben

POETS Day! Elizabethan Carpentry

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

David Letterman used to talk about windchill factor. A former weatherman, he thought it was goofy that a cold temperature was announced and then amended accounting for windchill making it the equivalent of a colder measurement rather than just saying the final, adjusted temperature. He’d call windchill fake but quickly add “Now humidity. That’s real.”

I’m with him. Humidity alone isn’t that bad. I don’t think I’ve ever complained about it in the winter. It needs heat to angry it up, but once you get those droplets riled the air’s venomous.

My phone reports the day’s temperature with a “Feels like” when it’s humid too, but that’s wrong. Completely wrong. Humidity isn’t an aspect of heat and doesn’t express as an increase of it. Saying “It’s 92° but with 70% humidity it feels like 103°,” assumes a flow towards equilibrium that’s not there. It would be more apt to say “It’s 92° but with 70% humidity it feels like 92° and you just dropped a cast iron skillet on your foot.” Humidity’s a separate and more immediate discomfort. In freeze-dried lasagna lore a frog in a pot of water over high heat doesn’t notice the slowly increasing temperature and keeps swimming about until he boils. Boils, not drowns. No one would believe the cautionary tale if he doesn’t go up for air. When you’re surrounded by water, heat is secondary.

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Tomato Jam (Extended Jam)

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… in which nothing was pressed.

In 1991, I went to a party in Lexington, VA, a place I was told at the time was the hot spot for inbreeding in the United States. My dad had recently been to Australia, and flying across that countrinent, he read an article in the in-flight magazine about a restaurant in Perth that was hailed as “The Best Restaurant in Australia.” It was near enough to his hotel so he went. “I’ve never been to the best restaurant in a country before,” he told me.

Being in the most inbred, per capita, city in a country is perfectly safe if you observe from a place of safety like an anthropologist in a blind or an oceanographer in a windowed diving bell. I was visiting a friend at Washington & Lee, so it was kind of like that. I don’t remember the party details. We went to a concert in a small columned structure and my friend was a first semester freshman, so I doubt it was Greek sponsored. It was private. I’m sure of that because there were only three or four hundred people in the hall and the headliner was a Robbie Robertson-less The Band. My friend was cute so she could get into any party. No idea why I was allowed in.

I’d never heard of the opening band. They were good, but fifteen minutes into their set I was pretty sure that they were still on their first song. I’d seen jam bands before. I saw The Grateful Dead when it was still jarring to see Bruce Hornsby out of his “and The Range” role. I laid in the grass at Oak Mountain Amphitheater twice while the Allman Brother played “Whipping Post” for two hours with brief side trips to other songs. It was just weird to hear an unknown band assume people liked a song they didn’t know and wanted to hear it riffed, dissected, and reassembled.

I know it was a small venue, but if the band asked me to play with them, I’d take the opportunity to showcase the breadth of what I can do; cast a wide net. These guys played one song – I’m pretty sure – for forty-five minutes. It was unexpected, but great.

I asked about them later. They were some guys from Georgia who were starting to get national attention: Widespread Panic.

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POETS Day! “Against Romanticism” by Kingsley Amis

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My son started school today, August 8. That’s absurdly early. Back in 2012 Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan tried to start a conversation about extending the school year by shortening summer vacation. There were arguments about students forgetting lessons between grades and valuable time wasted getting them back up to speed.

The conversation never went anywhere, but it wasn’t meant to. The Department of Education being a bureaucracy, the lack of pushback against an idea most didn’t take seriously meant no impediment to its inertia. So here we are.

I’m dying to say something snarky like “The more time kids are kept away from our public school system the better,” but I’m afraid, especially if I point to political speeches from both sides of the aisle over the course of decades lamenting the sorry state of education in America or mention unacceptable test scores impervious to decades of hand wringing to bolster my point, my friends with a wife/husband/son/daughter who’s a teacher might think I’m blaming a political party or theory of education or even a bloated nameless bureaucracy when really I’m saying that the entire decrepit mess is the fault of their wife/husband/son/daughter whose been trying to score Brownie points with that “I have to buy or sell (or whatever* it is she’s doing) art supplies with my own money,” sob story since We had a President who knew how to throw out an opening pitch.

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POETS Day! Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead

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It’s a stormy afternoon where I’m writing from. Loud and creeping grey. Not the kind of rain you sing in. There’ll be no park strolling or quarry swimming today. Flashes through the window tempt the unwary with the notion that the workplace is more sanctuary than prison, but that’s a lie. These are the POETS Days that try men’s souls. Freedom is won. It’s an assertion. Step out the door. Face the elements. Start your weekend early. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Be Lieutenant Dan, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse?

***

This is the most audacious landscape. The gangster’s
stance with his gun smoking and out is not so
vicious as this commercial field, its hill of glass.
– Muriel Rukeyser, “The Book of the Dead: Alloy”

In 1930, Rinehart and Dennis contracted to build a tunnel through Gauley Mountain near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia for New Kanawha Power Company, a subsidiary of the Union Carbide and Carbon Company, to divert the New River towards a hydroelectric plant.

Of the five thousand men employed to work on the project, some twenty-nine hundred toiled underground in ten to fifteen hour shifts. The project, completion estimated at four years from ground break, was finished in eighteen months. The mountain was composed of remarkably pure silica, so in compliance with safety regulations only wet drilling, a process that cut down on breathable silica in the air, was strictly adhered to when inspectors were on site. The rest of the time they dry drilled.

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POETS Day! John O’Brien

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I took several POETS Days off from the regular world recently, but rather than declaring “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” to reclaim a deserved – and I could go on, but those hours are ours by right – Friday afternoon, I tagged along with friends and family for a couple of weeks of nature. That meant going to Wyoming to hear the kids make “Teton” jokes, Montana to eat elk burgers and stay in a hotel within driving range of Yellowstone and snobby Bison that walk right up your car, cogitate, and pass without so much as a nod of acknowledgement, and then on to the second-most-fantastic state in the U.S. for white water rafting down the Salmon River, from which we returned despite the nickname. Again. It was all glorious. I got to wear SPF river pants that were almost identical to the parachute pants I wore in 1984, zippered pockets and all.

Idaho. I meant Idaho when I wrote “second-most…”

Hemingway killed himself in Blaine County, Idaho, where Ezra Pound was born. I’m not throwing that in to satisfy my POETS Day Ezra Pound mention quota, though it does do that. For whatever reason, that patch of land was an alpha or an omega to two remarkable literary careers. They were sparring partners and Pound considered Hemingway, who once said that he learned through Pound more “about how to write and how not to write than anywhere else,” one of his most intimate friends. Hemingway later helped secure Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital.

Pound’s connection to Blaine County is of his parent’s doing. He doesn’t mention his origins much directly in his writings – I should say, “In his writings that I’ve thus far read.” – except to present himself as a Philadelphian of the world. He does adopt a yokel written affectation in some of his letters: Robert Frost is “VURRY Amur’k’n,” and of Ulysses, in a letter to Joyce, he writes “An’ I reckon’ this here work o’ yourn is some concarn’d letershure.” The affectation is almost always used in association with something he admires or at least approves of. Pound was an awful snob so maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the yokel affectation grasps the heart of the matter. Was there a wistful bit of rural Idaho in him that came up in conversation between the two? It would make sense in response when (not if) Hemingway spoke of his Michigan woods. I have no evidence, but I assume Hemingway found Blaine via Pound and if I ever find some tale or exchange detailing the hows and wherefores, you’ll hear about it. It’ll be a POETS Day seven-parter.

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POETS Day! Robert Frost

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If you don’t sell beer, hot dogs, fireworks, gauze, charcoal brickettes, or are named Joey Chestnut you probably didn’t work on Tuesday. Independence Day, and the lounging inherent, is your inheritance as a citizen. But it was Tuesday. Even if you went in on Monday, did you really work? Is there any point in trying to claim productivity on a three-day work week? Accept the loss and claim the weekend now. Piss Off Early. Tomorrow’s Saturday.

CHORUS: 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, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

* * *

“Have just discovered another Amur’kn. Vurry Amur’kn, with, I think, the seeds of grace.”
-Ezra Pound in a March, 1913 letter to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry

The image of Robert Frost in my, and I assume many people’s, mind doesn’t jibe with what I conjure when thinking “Modern Poetry.”

I think of Eliot and Yeats out fastidiousing each other while Pound prowls the room in a feathered sombrero that matches his green velvet suit with blue glass buttons. H.D. oozes weird-girl-who-wears-black between visits to the flapper closet. Amy Lowell fixating, Wyndam Lewis – more of a painter but still – looking like an evil silent movie capitalist cum Byron, Wallace Stevens – no matter how buttoned down he’s supposed to have been – getting punched by Hemingway. All those varied and diverse figures share a crackling intensity. Not Frost.

Even trying to picture him in his late thirties as a newly minted expatriate, I still imagine him a grandfatherly figure who speaks a folksy but erudite Live Bait & General with a Hahvahd lilt. That image doesn’t fit with the other Moderns. He’s Sha Na Na at Woodstock.

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Stroganov’s Expanded Upon Beef Stroganoff

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When a dish is as simple as beef Stroganoff it’s hard to sift through the claims of invention. It’s sliced beef in sour sauce. Cut away all the variations and that’s what’s left. Not exactly splitting the atom.

Every town in Italy that can attach an “-ese” to the end of its name invented Minestrone. “Before us, there was no boiling water with vegetables in it!” they boast. “Dopo di noi, il diliziosa!” It’s chaos. Multiple Italian claims would have plagued meat sauce too, but the wily Bolognese, as a condition of submitting to Papal rule in 1506, insisted that all pasta sauces made with beef and tomatoes throughout Christendom be referred to as “Bolognese,” increasing their opportunity to sneer “That’s not real Bolognese.”

Alexander Grigorievich Stroganov (1795-1891) is likely who the dish is named for though there are other claimants. One story tells that Grigory Alexandrovich Stroganov’s (1770-1857) chef made a dish of minced meat because his master’s teeth were either gone or in such a state that chewing was out. Another says a chef attending to Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov (1774-1817) served julienned beef in sauce because the meat was so frozen it could only be shaved into ribbons. But it was Alexander Grigorievich Stroganov (1795-1891) who may have popularized the dish in Odessa, freeing it from aristocratic trappings, letting it mingle with common dishes of sliced beef in sour sauce where it could sneer, “That’s not real me.”

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POETS Day! Amy Clampitt

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“Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night / When everything’s a little clearer in the light of day / And we know the night is always gonna be here anyway?” So sang The Starland Vocal Band. “I didn’t want to write an all-out sex song,” said songwriter Bill Danoff. “I just wanted to write something that was fun and hinted at sex.” So he took the title from a Clyde’s restaurant happy hour menu in Georgetown, D.C. he ate at while his wife was having surgery for cervical cancer. “Afternoon Delight” hit number one on the charts and a POETS Day anthem was born. 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, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

I’m pretty sure my uncle worked at that Clyde’s.

***

I’m not feeling terribly Christian at the moment.

My grumpy old man mood began when The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2 caused a trip inside for a comparison with my high school copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. I was very comfortably reading in my backyard and the need for comparison annoyed me to no end.

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Getting Fries Right

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“Eat a McDonald’s hamburger and you might be getting a mouth full of antibiotics, hormones, and dangerous bacteria.” The italics are mine. That’s from “What’s really in a McDonald’s hamburger?” by Robin Konie published at thatnkyourbody.com. The curious non-capitalized headline is theirs.

There was pink slime, but that’s either gone as an ingredient or renamed something like “pure real beef that we swear is organix” or something. “pure real…” should probably capitalized. It’s catching.

I think food fear mongering is funny. Mt Dew used to contain brominated vegetable oil. It doesn’t now because people accused Pepsi Co. of putting “flame retardant” in their sody pop even though they only used a meh 8 parts per million of the stuff when the FDA says up to 15 parts is fine. Never mind that Mt. Dew is a fire retardant, as anyone who’s ever doused a MORPG session ash tray fire can attest.

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POETS Day! WH Auden’s “September 1, 1939”

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Photo by Herzi Pinki, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

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This week’s POETS Day enemy de jour de week is streaming video, not for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing, but for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing and making us soft. Our leisure is lurching towards too accommodating. They are waging war against our sense of what it means to have an event. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch Knight Rider, you had to be on the couch at seven on a Friday night and turn the pliers to NBC or, and I swear this happened, your dad would tell you that it’s “No big deal,” because “They’ll re-run it over the summer.” Those were tough times, but we were tough kids; not like kids today, steeped in this post-anticipation dystopia where the universe virtually bends to their whims. What do millennials do with such a dulled sense of expectation, never to knowing the exquisite longing of flipping through the Sears Catalogue toy section? What’s it like to wake up Christmas morning to find there’s nothing left to unwrap? As P.J. O’Rourke wrote, instant credit killed the dry hump. Nobody saves up for anything anymore. They are raising a generation incapable of deferred enjoyment. So take a stand and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s your life and your weekend so why should you wai… hold on… I…

This week’s POETS Day hero de jour de week is streaming video, not for…

***

Roy Campbell despised W.H. Auden. I assume the feeling was reciprocated.

During the Spanish Civil War, Campbell and his family on occasion hid Carmelite Monks in his house in Toledo from Loyalist communists backed by Stalin. It was a sprawling house and the monks not only took refuge, but stowed church documents there. He risked his life, as well as the lives of his wife and daughters, in doing so.

On July 22, 1936, Republican militia murdered seventeen Carmelites in the streets, among them former guests of the Campbell house. Suspecting ties, militiamen searched though the home. The family, fearing such a possibility, was able to clean out crucifixes and icons from the house but there was no time to remove the trunk of papers from the monastery from the front hall. Peter Alexander, author of Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography wrote, “The search of the house was thorough, but though the militiamen leaned their rifles on the Carmelite trunk, they never thought of opening it.” Alexander points out that possession of a missal could have meant death. One of the communists found Campbell’s copy of The Divine Comedy and yelled “Italian!” and then quickly “Fascist!” Alexander again: “But Campbell, with admirable presence of mind, showed them some of his Russian novels, and so convinced them that he was neutral.”

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