Category Archives: Uncategorized

POETS Day! Philip Larkin

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The copyright on this image is owned by Bernard Sharp Edit this at Structured Data on Commons and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

The copyright on this image is owned by Bernard Sharp and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 9/16/22 which was, in fact, a Friday. You can look it up.]

Happy P.O.E.T.S. Day! It’s been over a month since I posted one of these. Sorry, but life interrupts its own course sometimes. Unexplained absence due to a slack work ethic, galivanting across the countryside, or fitful bouts of Netflix bingeing aside, it’s that day again, so let’s let bygone days be bygone days and embrace the ethos of the moment to Piss off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, and having left work behind begin the weekend early with zeal and vigor and all sorts of other things we might feel when we find ourselves freed prematurely from the surly bonds of work.

I came across this week’s poet after doing one of my occasional listings of books that I feel like I should have read at some point in my life but never got around to. From my most recent reckoning I picked out Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. Everything I knew about it should have beckoned me earlier. The book is supposed to be hilarious and nasty (in the cruel rather that the Debbie Does Dallas sense.) I love hilarious and nasty (both senses.)

I started it last night and can attest to the nastiness. It’s like a sardonic P.G. Wodehouse tired of an “Oh Gosh!” Bertie Wooster trying to avoid an accidental engagement to be married and recreated him as Jim Dixon, a social climbing would-be lecher, given the right number of bitters, and let him loose on the unsuspecting English gentry. Imagine Wooster as Michael Knight and Jim as Garthe. I’ve only read the first eighty pages so that’s all I can attest to though I can only imagine he’ll get worse as I read on.

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How Do We Repay a Good Deed?

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My wife was at the Apple Store, a vile place that is kryptonite to upstanding Android/PC devotees such as myself, where they have those out the door lines. I suspect they make you take your shoes off to pass the threshold like when you were ten and went over to that kid’s house whose mom was a retired marine. The lady in line behind her heard my wife tell the clerk, who likely has a much more outlandish title than clerk, that she was there to replace her Apple Pencil (not ipencil because of “I, Pencil” I assume) as it had ceased. The woman behind her, untitled as far as we know, said that she was there to upgrade her something or another and that her Apple Pencil wouldn’t be compatible with the new set up. She gave my wife her old one.

That was really nice of her. It saved us a hundred and twenty buck or so, bolstered my rosey faith in humanity, and may have set her up for an adversarial interaction with the clerk (technology-duala or whatever) depending on whether iclerks work on icommissions. That eavesdropping line lady is alright.

So how do repay her kindness? We are on the down on the ledger and manners requires at least a gesture of some sort. I can only assume that the electronic item she gave us was first altered to track our location and listen into our conversations. We could put on some sort of show for her.

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POETS Day! Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Photo by Henry Kellner, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

It’s POETS Day! Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday… yay…

Look. I’m trying to be enthused about sneaking out of work and starting the weekend early, but the college football season is done. Party’s Over, Endure The Sabbatical feels a better fit. August 26 is a long way off and I’m full of existential questions. “Are you really a Saturday if no one misses a holding call?” “How are you not just a secular Sunday?” Justify yourself, Saturday.

I guess all the non-football related fun stuff is still out there and once the pain of loss ebbs I’ll pick up and remember that weekends are still worth living for and shift hours are still damned tools of the oppressor but right now my heart just isn’t in it. Sure, you could dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization as per usual, but why? There’s no college football methadone out there. The rules are still the same though let’s face it. We’re just going through the motions here. All means are a-okay in service of 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, I guess. I’ll need a bit to mourn and acclimate. Thankfully, there’s still verse to pass the time.

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A Blog in Full

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I’ve wanted to do more with the blog for a while or I’ve been wanting to do more with the blog for a while for precisely that reason. There has been a time over which I’ve wanted to do more with the blog so “I’ve been wanting” seems correct in that it conveys a continual desire over time, but it also seems clunky. “I’ve wanted” leaves it open as to whether I was occasionally hit by a passing fancy. I didn’t even attempt “I wanted.” That makes it sound like I considered and abandoned an attractive idea.

It’s a saw that you can break grammar rules when you know them and I’ve got personal experience that says the rules aren’t always the best way to precisely convey information. I bought a used copy of Warriner’s English Grammar as a refresher and we have a lot of writer on writing books at the house an a few snarky titles like The Deluxe Intransitive Vampire. I’ve wanted to do more with the blog because I think improved clarity will come as a byproduct of practice and grumbling at oddball constructions that either carry the right rhythm but also ambiguity or tell the reader exactly what I mean to say without the slightest hint of wit or character.

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My New Year’s Resolutions

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Boxing Day Recipe: Lamb Stuffed Cabbage Rolls In Tomato Sauce

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

Why can’t I simultaneously heat the interior of my car and defrost the windshield? Why is this an either-or proposition? Yes, I can get heat through the floor vents while defrosting but the steering wheel is freezing and leeching whatever warmth was left in my numb fingers so immediacy is required up top instead of down below and no promises of eventual relief from rising heat will mollify my mystification at the inertness of the wide open and ready dash vents. I drive a Hyundai. It’s not the most luxurious vehicle ever devised but if there’s one thing they nailed, I mean engineered beyond my dreams and avarice, it’s the power of the heater. I can go from teeth-clattering misery as I get in the driver’s seat to wishing I had taken off my jacket or sweater in a matter of minute, from sitting in an icy pond to standing under a launching space shuttle. It’s a quick quickener.

The Koreans outfitted my car with four fan speeds. That tells me that there’s a little wiggle room. I could set the heat at fan speed two or three to warm me and my fellow travelers and there should theoretically still be enough juice in the motor to push warmed air through the vents at the base of the windshield where carpool number cards live. Naturally, I’d prefer to have both the defrost and heater roaring at speed four, but I would settle for as low as two if that’s what it takes to see both in action simultaneously. Not speed one though. I’m not a pushover.

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Some Housekeeping

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I just realized that I haven’t posted any links to the stuff I’ve written over at Splice Today. It’s a cool eclectic site that you’ll likely get a kick out of if you have a moment or so. Check them out. Nice people.

A Quick Note on the Rossetti POETS Day Post

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I mentioned the parallel between the sisters Laura and Lizzie in “The Goblin Market” and the sisters Lilian and Lilias in “An Apple Gathering” in my earlier post. I didn’t make clear my beliefs on why Rossetti didn’t use the names of the first set of sisters twice rather than give the second original names meant to call the first to mind.

This is probably something apparent to many, but I had an “Oh… of course.” moment when thinking about it so I figure it deserves mention if for no other reason to show that what you may consider obvious I may consider cryptic and secreted away. We know that in “The Goblin Market” it’s Laura that gives in to temptation and that Lizzie resists in the face (literally) of an onslaught of enticement. We know who was strong and who was weak. That is not the case with Lilian and Lilias. They are meant to be counterparts to the first but not individually. One of the two has sinned, but we don’t know which. We assume the heroine of “An Apple Gathering” knows which of the two needed forgiveness, but to the reader, so complete was the power of redemption that, Lilian is indistinguishable Lilias and vice versa. We’re not supposed to be able to tell the difference.

I thought that was a deft little move on Chrissie’s part.  

Amble On

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Today I imagined my neighborhood differently. It was during our early evening walk where my wife and I discuss the lighter parts of the day: the children’s preoccupations of the moment, oddities we saw or heard about, a bit of gossip, or what we’ve been reading or watching. Sometimes our conversations verge on free association riffing off each other as we stroll. Sometimes we walk in quiet. My mind wanders when we do that.

In my head the streets are filled with other people walking, more than the usual dog walkers and joggers by a large margin. These new people, make believe neighbors all, were social; waving to each other and asking about this or wishing well about that. The houses were still one story two- or three-bedroom constructs, but they were also shops. One was a florist, another a bookstore. There was a grocer and a wine shop(pe), and aside from the architecture the streets looked every bit as if they belonged in a British country village where tranquility threatens to be shattered by first one murder and then another. Unfortunately, the nosy vicar or widowed librarian figures out who the murderer is, but only after the cad strikes his third and final victim (the police detective being otherwise indisposed at the Covington Estate, investigating the connections between a land developer and the murdered local dowager’s playboy nephew who just yesterday returned from the south of France only to find his aunt gasping her last almond-scented breath.)

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On the Cusp of Wisdom

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

Wisdom is acquired. It is something that takes time to realize. I’m on the cusp. I ordered COEVALS CLUB Men’s Western Cowboy Long Sleave Pearl Snap Casual Plaid Work Shirt (Black & Gray #9, L) on October 14th. The web site said that I should expect the item on the 30th.

That’s a bit more of a wait than I’m used to (I’m a Prime member, natch) but the exercise of patience is a stepping-stone along the path. To test me further I was taunted by an email from Amazon informing me that my arrival date (because that’s what it is, really) had been revised and to expect my package on the 16th. Here I sit on the 17th lamenting the latest missive. Arrival has been changed once again, this time to the 18th by 10pm. Waiting and acceptance of disappointment deliver bitter lessons. Considerate of the amassed wisdom of Tantalus I sit.

The stage is otherwise set. I have a beard and some comfortably-fitting worn jeans. My work boots have visible scuffs (you have to look kinda close) and I live near a creek. My hair is not particularly long or stylishly unkempt but I don’t fuss with it much so it has a natural look even if it’s not the natural look and I grew up in Alabama so I can convincingly affect a southern accent. All I’m lacking is a casual plaid work shirt and I can project the same discerningly non-judgmental, soul-searching savoir faire as our modern-day Gandalf: Kris Kristofferson. But in a non-threatening way like that guy in that commercial.

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