“On the day before the burning of the Pyramid, the men who got down from their high horses scourged me with burning irons, to compel me to reveal the site of a buried treasure. Before my eyes they toppled the idol to the god, yet the god did not abandon me, and I held my silence through their tortures. They tore my flesh, they crushed me, they mutilated me, and then I awoke in this prison, which I will never leave alive. – Jorge Luis Borges, “The Writing of the God”
That’s a terrible attitude. I should note that he didn’t despair and by the end of the story achieves an enlightenment which renders his physical circumstances moot, but POETS Day esteems escapism. Constricting circumstances shouldn’t be tolerated. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s an afternoon waiting to be played with.
My beach book choices tend towards mystery or comedy. I see a lot of thrillers on condo rental shelves and a few romances. People hide romances though, so I’m sure what I’ve seen is not representative. Elmore Leonard deserves a category of his own unless he wants to share it with Carl Hiaasen. Whatever gets sold in an airport likely fits the beach book bill. That and Ovid.
Romance readers are voracious. My wife’s in publishing so I pick up tidbits here and there I can repeat with an unearned air of authority. Romance is the highest earning genre. 2022: 33% of books sold in mass market paper back have Fabio ripping someone’s bodice featured on the cover. Formats that don’t require readers to tear off or otherwise hide from judging eyes Fabio’s rippled abs and radiant pecs account for 60% of all the genre’s sales. E-books let Romance fans read while hanging out by the pool without a miscued cabana boy thinking the lady needs comforting or raised brows from fellow vacationers or worse (in-laws.)
With no burly-esque cover art, e-readers are free to move about the country. Perception matters. People don’t want to have to explain themselves or be thought of as lesser. A kindle denies any stigma apportioning, but that’s all it does. In the big ledger of literary respect from strangers, staying out of the red is important, but what if you want racy tales that put you in the black?
I was in a used bookstore downtown, earlier today. It’s a ramshackle place with books and old magazines stacked on warped piles of records and rolled up blueprints and “Mardi Gras 1977” posters leaning against assumed tables; probably enough kitschy crap to deck out a whole reinvigorated warehouse district worth of lesbian coffee houses. The poetry section shines. Either the owner’s tastes or the resale temperament does a commendable job filtering out new age gibberish and incongruent anthologies plus he shelves criticism with the criticized. I picked up a book of T.S. Eliot essays on Elizabethan drama. Last time I found a collection of poets’ views on Yeats. Five bucks, both.
While I was perusing the poetry a young woman, attractively in her mid-twenties or so, came in and struck up a conversation with the owner. She was in town for business, she said, doing a three-day project that only took two. She didn’t know anybody in town. Could he suggest anything? Sights? A place for lunch?
The only other person in the shop was a young guy, roughly her age, perusing local history and thumbing through old magazines. I knew he heard. The place was too small not to have. I’m old and happily married. The owner, older still. I don’t know local history guy’s story. I don’t know any of attractive work tourist’s story beyond what I’ve shared either, but what I had always considered a laughable cliché – a used bookstore hook up – was not unfolding before me despite the stage being improbably set. Local history didn’t so much as look over his shoulder.
The week’s winding down despite the extra insert day February stuck us with. It’s POETS Day again, time to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Sneak out of the nine to five closer to two. Seize the few hours left in the day and get a head start on evening.
There are all manner of things to do and if you’re of the POETS Day bent you’re probably not a free time naif. You know where happy hours are, what ball games are on, and whether or not the pool is open. All noble pursuits, but have you thought about vegging out in front of the TV (television)? Water cooler shows aren’t really a thing anymore; so many viewing choices make it unlikely that any one program will achieve the reach of Seinfeld or other shows of old.
People still talk about TV at work, though. The shared viewing conversation has been replaced by a recommendation marketplace. “You seen anything good lately?” turns everyone within ear shot into Ewan McGregor from Rogue Trader (YouTube – Free, Amazon Prime – $5.99 rental, $11.99 to buy), barking on the Singapore Stock Exchange floor. They may not wear the garish brokerage house team jackets like those worn by the traders in Singapore – unless they work as traders in Singapore – but they’re just as enthusiastic.
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.
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.
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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?”
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.
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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.
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.
I’m usually a one check a year guy. J.T. Smallwood has been our tax collector since 2002 so each year I write my property tax check out directly to him, which seems nefarious but is done out in the open in a courthouse with badged officials and efficacious lanyards directing people between various stanchions connected with retractable nylons. There are several signs on the walls and copied sheets clear taped to the counters directing property owners at sufferance to “Make checks payable to J.T. Smallwood.” Credit cards are not accepted.
I wonder what happens when someone wants to write a check to J.T. Smallwood. A neighbor pitching in for a block party, say.
I pay my property tax in December, so I’m past the novelty of the new year and always get the date right. Younger generations will find this hard to believe, but there is no auto-correct for payment dates on checks and the possibly apocryphal rule that a check is good for a full year or six months, depending on who you listen to, was ignored for checks written between Dick Clark and Valentines for human frailty reasons. For all our penicillins, moon launches, and bread slicing, we’re not very good at the small stuff. Habits of the previous ten and a half months carried over. Every check written during that changeover period carried the uncertainty of a Super Bowl winner’s season of victory.
I had cause to write a check yesterday, and I’m proud to say that I wrote 2024 with no hint of hesitation. Was it the novelty of the act? I can’t say. I can say that the new year is off to a paper-saving good start.
Let’s keep the good start going and make use of that paper credit. There are blank notebook pages in desperate need of exercise regimens, weekly diet menu plans, lists of great books you always meant to get around to reading, or names of friends who can tell you if Rosetta Stone is better than Duolingo and which monthly “Soltanto Francais” get togethers serve the best merlot. Resolutions don’t get planned while work is being done so do yourself a favor and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make 2024’s first one a resolute POETS Day.
Try reading a little verse first. The line breaks excite the list maker’s bullet point urge.
I’m sure you’ve heard that there are only nine shopping days left until Christmas. I’m acutely aware, kept up to date by radio, tv, and internet. If I somehow managed to avoid all those electronic reminders, there’s the traffic. There’s no correct lane switching strategy with an army of Amazon vans suffocating every intersection and left averse UPS trucks double parked three to a block. Fed Ex drivers like to park in the median. Maybe they train in Philadelphia.
We let the holidays get hectic. It’s commercial and too often anxiety reigns. “Do I have a present for Dad?” “What do I get my sister?” The buildup was already an ordeal and then advertisers got shifty and started using “gift” as a verb. What gets lost in all of this is what’s important: that there are only three Fridays left to lie, scheme, and dissemble in 2023.
Carpe diebus. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. This is the last one before your penultimate chance of the year. Don’t let the weekend just happen. Be an instigator. Fake a cough, arrange an “emergency call.” Whatever you have to do. Start your weekend on your terms and slip out a few hours before The Man™ deigns to give leave. Have a ball, but try to fit in a few minutes for a little verse. It’s POETS Day. Make the most of it.
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“I explicated a Donne sonnet and paid uncomprehending lip-service to a beefy dirge by someone called John Skelton.” – The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis
There is a park across the street from my house. It runs along Shades Creek, a feeder to the Cahaba River and part of the watershed that provides drinking water for the Birmingham area. That’s terrifying considering how much trash we get from upstream.
The Columbo Game 