I live in a city that is not prepared for cold weather. My northerly relatives laugh when we shut down for snow or icy conditions but we don’t have all the toys they have. If these were regular enough occurrences to justify a snowplow corps or whatever you call the truck that salts the road, we’d have one. But they aren’t. So we don’t. Or maybe we wouldn’t.
The truth is, we like the snow days – “snow days” being a catch all for any day off due to snow, freezing rain, or because James Spann or one of the lesser weatherfolks says there might be snow or freezing rain. Nobody can get to work except the people who own a liquor store and everybody can get to the liquor store. Kids, in particular, love snow days. Every so often we get a real event where cars are abandoned on highways and schools have to host impromptu sleep overs in the gym. Those are important because they give cover when the county preemptively calls a for closings when the weather forecast indicates the chance of something threatening and everybody wants a day off to go to the liquor store. “Better safe that sorry,” says the thirsty school board.
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.
I live in a quiet neighborhood. It hugs a thoroughfare like a drop of water on a spider’s tendril; a bump bound by a busy road to the north and a creek to the south. People from around town occasionally visit to make use of the parks, but there’s no other destination to be found unless you live here or are visiting a friend. You can’t cut through en route to anywhere. Traffic is limited to us and Amazon and as a result the streets are alive with dog walking, bike riding, couple strolling, and kids playing. It’s nice and peaceful, but the best part is the three naked coeds who frolic by the creek.
They rent a house from local doctor who spent two years playing linebacker for the Steelers. No foolin’. Like most nursing students, they keep odd hours studying and shadowing professionals at the university hospital, but one thing is certain: Friday afternoon is al fresco cavorting time.
It’s such a Spring and Summertime certainty that if you, like me, are out of the accursed habit of wearing a watch, you could set the sock-drawer relegated “mausoleum of all hope and desire” timepiece by the appearance of light sundresses hanging from the branches of the upper bank pecan tree. Must be two o’clock.
Like sands through the hourglass, so are the episodes of Days of Our Lives dutifully unwatched by a somnambulist workforce blindly attending to responsibilities. Thanks to the protestant work ethic supposedly dying in the United States, the world’s longest running scripted T.V. (television) show is now streaming on something called Peacock Network; premium subscription only. Want to know how Kristen reacts to the revelation that she and Megan are really sisters? What Brady, who won’t take Kristen’s desperate jailhouse calls, will do now that Vic’s name came up during her hypnosis session with Steph? Too bad. That’s for Premium Members only. This is on you, POETS Day people. Daytime shows die when people slack off viewing in favor of work. Days of Our Lives lost its regularly scheduled slot, but it’s not too late to save Judge Judy, Let’s Make a Deal, and so many others. There are good, honest, salt-of-the-Earth types in Hollywood. They don’t ask much. Just Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. That three or four hours at the end of the week is what?… Time to write a sales projection report for your employer? Maybe an inventory of pre-stressed cement planks? It doesn’t seem like a lot to you and me, but that little bit of extra viewing might mean a new Fendi stroller for a Hollywood pre-toddler or a new Grayson Perry ceramic vase lending his trademark incongruity to a lonely Hollywood etagere. So lie, dissemble, fudge the truth, whatever you need to do to get out of work in the wee PM hours and get a jump start on the weekend. Go to a neighborhood watering hole. Ask the barman to turn off the afternoon baseball game and turn on something Wapneresque. Even thirty minutes a week watching I Love Lucy reruns on a fledgling local network may raise the ratings enough to interest a plaintiff’s attorney in purchasing a life giving ad spot. Act now before all our gameshows, small claims court dramas, tabloid talk formats, and yes, even our stories are gone. The next Oprah is out there waiting. But as always, make time for a little verse.
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The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance
The jeweled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And I let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
By Rihaku.
Note. – Jewel stairs, therefore a place. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain, of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.
Ezra Pound once wrote that he was, not without cause, accused of selling his notebooks. If you’ve ever read “How to Read” or any of the essays in ABC of Reading you’ll know what he means and be grateful for it. His prose invites a peak into his thought process and breadth of comparison. The above is an excerpt from his book Cathay, Translations by Ezra Pound and lengthily subtitled For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga. The above poem is the only one from that collection with appended notes making it the most interesting entry in the collection.
Yesterday was opening day. You’d think Major League Baseball would feature all manner of get out of work early fare for the first Friday of the season but it doesn’t. The earliest game starts at 6:40 ET. That’s a bit too late on the East coast and probably around midnight or so on the West coast, but I may be off there – the metric system never made sense to me. How do people play hooky to see a game that doesn’t start until they get off work? I don’t want to trot out “You’re either for us or you’re against us,” for MLB because they’ve been such a friend to POETS Day in the past, but I feel like they dropped the ball here. That said, baseball’s error is no excuse for you to lay down on laying down on the job. The weekend starts when you say it does. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Consider your boss and get your mind right. That’s the enemy. Hold nothing back. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass whatever norms and delicate pieties are left to 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 to watch yesterday’s highlights and some pre-game blather, tap your fingers impatiently on the bleachers of a local ball park, realize that it doesn’t matter how the long the line is for a hot dog considering that it’ll be God knows how long before the first pitch, or heavens forfend, throw up your hands in frustration and watch soccer. 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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The anonymous writer of the bio for Hilda Doolittle at the invaluable Poetry Foundation notes that the poet suffers from early success. “H.D.’s justified reputation as the greatest and purest imagist paradoxically led to a critical cage whose perpetrators either lamented the fact that she stopped writing perfect gems or persisted in discussing five and ignoring 45 years of poetic development.” She wrote remarkably later in life and while I’ve read bits from that period I’m not at all as familiar with the later as I’ve become with the earlier. Scholarship since the 1970s, no doubt to the delight of the bio writer, celebrates the whole body of her work as remarkable. “Helen of Egypt” (1961) is held out as particularly significant.
Call me a Philistine, but I’m currently interested in her early Imagist period and will persist in my admiration of five at the expense of what followed. It was Glenn Hughes, author of Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (1931), who first referred to Doolittle as “the purist imagist.” In the 1913 issue of “Poetry” a set of three poetic principles as put forth by the three original Imagistes: Ezra Pound, Doolittle, and her husband Richard Aldington.
The Columbo Game 