My family gave me James May’s cookbook, Oh Cook! 60 Easy Recipes That Any Idiot Can Make, for Father’s Day.
“Hey!” you might be saying to yourself as you read this. “I know James May. He’s that English guy from Top Gear back when it was cool and producers got punched. He’s the one who wears those Jackson Pollock shirts and whose hair won’t let him be his age.” And you’d be right.
I’m a cookbook reader, by which I mean when I get a new cookbook, not always but usually, I start at the beginning and read all the non-instructional text. I do read the text of recipes before I eventually make them, but I like the stories and bits of history and trivia that pepper the pages enough to put up with the naturally sourced/sustainable/organic sanctimony (Jamie Oliver thinks he’s Food Jesus.) I’ve pored over Escoffier, Marcella Hazan (Her Name Be Praised), and again and again the books of M.F.K. Fisher. I don’t write this lightly:
Under the heading “A Note on Weights and Measures,” James May has written the most important paragraph ever to grace the pages of a cookbook.
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, 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.
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“Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveller; he Served human liberty.” – from “Swift’s Epitaph” by W.B. Yeats
Though a thorough Nationalist, it was not Yeats’ wish that Ireland should erupt in violence, but he knew a Rubicon when he saw one.
“Spiedini” is an Italian word, but it means “skewer.” There’s nothing innately Italian about that part. People have been cooking things on sticks the world over since the first guy burnt his hand. “Amogio” is innately Italian, specifically Sicilian; old as the hills but with no good story trailing behind. It’s citrus and herbs with olive oil and a touch of spice. It’s a simple recipe that takes advantage of the island’s selective bounty.
I’ve read that when the Greeks arrived, Sicily was inhabited by the Elymi to the west, the Sicuni in the central region, and the Siculi along the east. Each had a style of cooking that, other than that they all used roughly the same ingredients – citrus, herbs, olives, nuts, seafood, and the occasional meat, I’ve read was distinct. I can’t find any commentary to enlighten me as to how they were distinct, just that they were. The Greeks didn’t change much to the cuisine other than introduce fish stew, which seems improbable. Anybody that lives by the sea and has a pot will get that notion on their own.
The Greeks had staying power. Syracuse was a force as early as the fifth century B.C. and Hellenic dialects were still dominant under Augustus when Rome was dependent on the island for wheat. In 831, under Saracen rule, the capital moved from Syracuse to Palermo and Greek influence faded. According to Waverley Root in his book The Food of Italy, the Saracens never left, “They are at any rate still with us in the kitchen. Almost everything which strikes us today as typically Sicilian is typically Saracen.”
My kids are out for summer vacation; have been for almost two weeks now. They got a preview of a classless existence twice in May. Their schools allow for a number of “snow days” every year so that should Alabama see a repeat of The Blizzard of ’93 (TM) and the world stops the kids still have the required amount of official school days on the books. If those days don’t get used the administration starts doling them out like a UN aid worker with food and nylons. Suddenly the kids are beaming on a Thursday at three o’clock because the weekend’s arrived a day early. Though floating snow days are nothing new, I was taken by surprise this year because I assumed that post COVID we all knew how to pretend that we got enough done online to meet state guidelines and wouldn’t need them anymore. But the free days popped up and graced early and mid-May Fridays with smiling children playing jacks and hopscotch on the sidewalk, sucking in their stomachs for the high-school lifeguards plus one-third their age, and doing other loveable scamp Rockwell fodder. Good for them. POETS Day knows no age restrictions. I’m taking the idea of unused excuses for off days and running with it. Never go into the half with timeouts in your pocket. Last week was my seventy-fifth POETS Day post for Ordinary Times and it passed right by me, unnoticed. I’m sure some of you were puzzled why I didn’t mention it, but I didn’t realize. This week I’m calling for a POETS Day SNOW Day where POETS stands for Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday like always and SNOW stands for Skedaddle Now. (The O and W are part of NOW so the acronym actually does work. It’s like the A would be in NASA if instead of National Aeronautics and Space Administration it was National Space Administration and they still kept it NASA, because people wouldn’t mind the A from National bleeding into the Space because they like vowels in words. A lot of people probably do think it is National Space Administration and they’ve never complained, so… it’s fine.) Take the belated celebratory free day with my tardy apology. Tell your boss you’re pissing off early in honor of the POETS Day Diamond Jubilee… No. Tell him you’re pissing off early in honor of the Diamond Jubilee. He’ll know.
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When I first decided to write a weekly series about poets and poetry I mapped out what I wanted to do and set a few parameters. One of the first rules was that there would be no translations. I’ve broken that rule a few times but I didn’t want to be caught in a situation where I was unsure if I enjoyed the work of the poet, the translator, or the combination. When I read Pound’s Cathay, or more specifically when I read about how Pound’s Cathay came to be, my conception of translations changed.
If you haven’t read any of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout, you’ve deprived yourself of endless well spent afternoons. That’s why the books exist. They’re lunch to dinner length and engaging so you don’t nap away a day off.
My dad claims to have read them all though I don’t see how he knows. I’ve read ten or twelve, I think. Maybe I’ve read six of them twice or four of them three times. They’re not meant to be life changingly memorable. The plots are intricate enough to keep you guessing but evenly so throughout the series. They’re tuxedos; none of them impolitely stands out, interchangeable like a Bertie and Jeeves story, but with crimes more serious than pilfering cow creamers.
Murder’s not the thing anyway, at least for me. It’s the joy of spending time in the agoraphobic Wolfe’s brownstone with the orchids or in the study where every seat has an attending table to sit a beer on, stopping for a ham sandwich and a glass of milk with Archie Goodwin the narrator, or imagining the menu put out by Fritz Brenner, Wolfe’s live-in chef.
A woeful POETS Day casts a shadow on my corner of Birmingham. My local library sunk.
It flooded, actually. A pipe burst and they’ve closed to replace drywall and carpeting, and according to a “Letter from the Director,” they won’t re-open for the next few months. The Director advised patrons to hold on to borrowed books until the Mississippi State game (she didn’t phrase it that way exactly, but this being Alabama she could have) rather than return them to other branches; something about storage. I’m stuck with a Longfellow collection I’m not fond of and Lowell’s The Dolphin that I’ve read and enjoyed but am not likely to pick up again anytime soon.
For the librarians – the bearded guy who seems in charge and looks like he’s wearing a turtleneck even when he isn’t, the nice lady whose tattoos suggest a pre-librarian wilding, the young guy who paints his nails black, the persnickety guy who’s mad at me because I returned a book without the bar code it didn’t have when I checked it out but who still suspects I have a drawer full of ill-gotten bar codes in my lair, and the guy who says, without fail, “I’ve been meaning to pick up [fill in poet’s/author’s name] again,” no matter what book I check out – it was looking like an involuntary Piss Off Early, ‘Til September. The most recent missive from the Director states that they’ve found a temporary location so they’ll be back to shushing soon, but the selection of books on hand will be limited. I suspect there will be little poetry to browse.
Other locations in the Jefferson Co. system have poetry sections, but O’Neal, the nearby flooded one, was the repository. It’s where the system stores the bulk of the genre, thankfully on the second floor, and where requests are filled for patrons of other branches. It sounds like the collection will be available, but I’ll have to order what I want which means I’ll have to know what I want. I like wandering around on a Monday looking for a tempting spine. As it is, for the next few months I’ll lean mostly on my collection and internet-available poems. Be ready for revisited poets. If you thought I spent too much time talking about Pound before…
I like Jeopardy. They read the answer and you respond with the question? That’s crazy. Backward games fascinate me. I like the “get to know the contestants” segment after the first round of plaintiff lawyer and Rinvoq ads. Ken Jennings or Mayim Bialik, depending on who’s turn it is to be unfairly compared to Alex Trebek, says hi to each player and prompts them to tell a little about a producer-approved vignette from their life so viewers get a humanizing glimpse of the person they just made fun of for thinking the Bismarck bombarded Spitzbergen in September, 1943. A recent contestant was asked about playing in cornhole tournaments. She played in two. In one, her team placed third, but she said they did better in the other, by which I assume she meant they took second. She added that there were fewer teams in the second tournament. This wasn’t James Holzhauer with a thirty-two game win streak and reams of biographical material already spent trying to cull together some parental awws as filler. This was the woman’s first and possibly only “my life” story in front of a national audience. The big time. As it turns out, she won and became the new champion, so on the next show we got to hear the penultimate scintillating producer-approved morsel from her time on this planet: A famous person told her “Happy Mother’s Day.” As it turns out, the famous person was speaking at her daughter’s graduation so the “Happy Mother’s Day” was to the audience. But she was in it! Unfortunately, she didn’t win again so there was no dramatic rendition the following day of the time she thought her front tire was flat but it turned out to be a shadow. All we got was that she threw bean bags moderately well and sat in a crowd.
I want to know what stories the producers passed on. Did cornhole and a speech attendance get picked because they were somehow the most interesting, or was she freakishly NC-17 and everything else she shared involved farm animals and out of state fireworks? I’m imagining a wits end production meeting: “Backstage at Guns & Roses is a no-go, the statute hasn’t run out on the Florida trip one, and the airplane stunt… I keep telling her you can’t say midget on T.V. anymore but it’s like I’m speaking to Don Rickles. I can’t believe we have to go with cornhole – which is still a risk considering the mouth on her. Did she really know Adam West?”
If bean bags and general well wishes were as interesting as it got, you may be saying she needs a POETS Day release to make memorable mischief. If she’s running ultraviolet on the network-okayed colorful character spectrum and the show settled for the only stories they wouldn’t have to bleep, you may be saying she needs to be honored as a POETS Day Patron Saint. I don’t know enough to decide either way, but I am saying Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday because you have to grab a Friday afternoon away from work and watch Jeopardy. It’s on at 3:30 in my market and I’m assuming a similar time in yours. It’s a great show and that cornhole lady seemed sweet.
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When I was in school I read all the poetry I was supposed to read. I knew about “Evangeline” and “The Faerie Queen” even if I don’t remember much now. I read Paradise Lost, “Annabelle Lee” and “The Raven,” “Leaves of Grass,” and I learned about tigers burning and despair. I still remember the first twenty-plus lines of The Canterbury Tales and can say them really fast. I also still remember old English bad words for lady parts from “The Miller’s Tale.” I did what was asked and passed the tests.
I don’t want to alarm anybody, but our kids are on the cusp of vacation, assuming they paid attention in biology class and don’t have to repeat that fetal pig desecrating nightmare stuck in a lab all summer while their friends jeep blissfully to the lake to see what the girls in class look like partially clothed. I wouldn’t wish those institutionalime hydroclorosmelling tiles on anyone. They’ll be leaping all over the place while the adults drudge away. Child is father to the man – take the lesson. You may not get a whole summer but pilfered weekday added to a weekend serves as a salve of some sort. 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 to the lake “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.
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It was pointed out to me last week that Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton all spent time in McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital, in Massachusetts. McLean also claims Ray Charles, David Foster Wallace, and James Taylor as alumni. That I went to the same high school as Kate Jackson seems suddenly less impressive. But I did. Bea Arthur once grabbed my ass.
Can you plagiarize yourself? This is the third time I’ve written down the recipe and step by step for this sandwich. The first time I called it an “ersatz Chic-fil-A” because in ninth grade I read Tom Robbins’s Still Life with Woodpecker and his main character used a baptismal candle as an “ersatz” sexual aid. Robbins was transgressive in way that didn’t hit you over the head with a sledgehammer. He drove the phonies nuts.
I tried to re-read one of his novels a few years ago and confirmed only good books grow up with you. Still, the word “ersatz” stuck in my head and I use it more often than I should. I like the sound and the memory of stopping to go to the dictionary. The word seemed arcane to me. Now I have problems with Robbin’s usage. He’s saying the candle was an ersatz ersatz?
I used “Chic-fil-esque” in that article, which was an unwitting segue into my second go at this sandwich, the second go being my first possible plagiarism. In that one I called it a Chic-faux-a, visually mimicking the emphatic syllable divisions in “Chic-fil-A”, but without the “L” sound the satirical similarity is reliant on a slanted assonant rhyme like this is some kind of folk or contemporary pop song and readers deserve better.
Today we salute the unsung heroes of POETS Day. The Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday promise of freedom, relaxation, and entertainment ushered in a few hours before the official start of the weekend would go unfulfilled were it not for those willing to work while we play. To the bartenders, Uber drivers, ticket takers, and legally registered Nevada prostitutes we offer a heartfelt thanks. You are the wind beneath our wings. Let’s not let their sacrifice be in vain. 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 (provided you tip), lay comfortably in the grass at a local park (be sure and tell the groundskeeper how much you appreciate his work), go for a swim (fake like you’re drowning so the lifeguard can add a “Local Hero” newspaper clipping to his college applications), or God forbid, go for a light jog (thank the… jogging is antisocial.) It’s your weekend. Give a nod to those whose labors let you 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.
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Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin, published in 1973, won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Lowell’s second; the first being for 1947’s Lord Weary’s Castle. He was the most confessional of the Confessional Poets, a name given by critics, often over the objections of the poets, rather than a formal association. As the name would imply, the Confessional Poets, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton among others, delved into their personal lives as all poets will, but they went further, blurring the line between person and persona and exposing aspects regarded usually as deeply private. Despite the Pulitzer, The Dolphin will likely be remembered as the book where Lowell went too far.
