Tag Archives: fiction

POETS Day! Eliot’s 1st Part of the 2nd of Four Quartets

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

There’s a BarBQ place a mile and a half from our house that my children like to ride their bikes to, get an order of fries, and spend an afternoon downing soda and reading books. Monday, I hopped in the car for a quick trip to the store and came up on my youngest cycling, about halfway to the restaurant, and pulled over to ask if he wanted me to pick up anything while I was out. He told me I wasn’t the first person to pull over and talk to him that afternoon. Some persnickety woman rolled down her window a block or so from our house to “Make sure everything was all right.” She told him it wasn’t safe to be out biking.

The kid is thirteen. When did it become an oddity that one of his tribe might be outside by themselves? We hope she does it again. Next time my kid is going to point at her and start screaming “Stranger Danger!” at the top of his lungs.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Go outside and have some fun. Make it an honest to God POETS Day. Skip out of work and be as free and independent as a kid on a bike.

***

East Coker is a real place. Barely. It’s a tiny village in Summerset set as inland as can be, sandwiched between the Bristol and English Channels, on the north and south respectively; somewhere between Southampton and Plymouth on that southernmost extension of Great Britain the Pilgrims watched sink below the horizon. Wikipedia counts the population as 1667 souls as of the last edit and pictures tell me it’s the kind of quaint English village ripe for a festival-related trio of murders only a clergyman or spinster can solve, to the embarrassment of the local constabulary.

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POETS Day! Charles Mackay of Extraordinary Popular Delusions Fame

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

My kid can type. I don’t mean he just knows how. He dropped into a conversation about something else that he started fiddling with a typing tutor website and “plays” the exercises between games or watching videos when he’s messing around on the computer. He’s been at it for three years. We think we keep an eye on what he does online but this was the first my wife or I heard about it, so we tested him on a random type training site, one he wasn’t familiar with.

He’s over one hundred words a minute at 99% accuracy. He’s thirteen. We’re a little terrified that he was able to spend as much time as he obviously has online without our knowing what he was up to, but damn. He won’t need a POETS Day plan. If he sticks to white collar employment, he’ll blaze throught as much by noon as his co-workers manage all day.

As for the rest of you, come up with something. Pretend a cough, remember a religious observance, whatever you have to do to get out of work and live it up on a Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, here’s a bit of verse.

***

One of the reasons I subscribe to The Free Press is for access to dueling articles on a subject. Here’s a guy who thinks war is bad. Here’s a guy who thinks war is good. And they’ll cross link if the two come out a few days apart.

I read the comments on both. Their paired articles seem less plagued by comment section trolls than the standard stuff, not that those are particularly afflicted when compared to the internet as a whole. I don’t think think I’ve ever been radically swayed by one of the exchanges—article or comment—but I get a few questions answered and pick up a few new questions in the process and emerge just as annoyingly opinionated but with a new array of plugged-in patina building bits of info to pester friends and family with. More than worth the $10 a month subscription price.

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POETS Day! Talkin’ Chaucer at the Godsibbing Fense

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I’m listening to a book about free speech and the necessity of, and the author went on for a few minutes about punishments meted out for violations of English law in Colonial America. It was amazing stuff. They’d cut off your ears for offending the Crown’s reputation, even for questioning it. Lucky loudmouths might get off with a cropping where they’d just trim off the ear tops. Tongues were bored, ears were nailed to pillories, many whippings of designated number and severity were prescribed.

One sorry SOB had his tongue bored, his arms broken, and then with his arms “dangling,” according to the author Jonathan Turley, was forced to run a gauntlet as men beat him with rifle butts.

What the hell did he say?

I hope he said it loudly. Clearly and from a high place on a stark, windy day. I hope his wind aided preferably bass voice carried across the land and turned the head of every man, woman, and child. I don’t know the content, but I hope he got the most from it.

This isn’t a segue to slippery slopes and non-crime hate incidents. It’s POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work and read a book. There are a lot of them out there. I’m enjoying Against the Country, by Ben Metcalf. Listening to a book, as I’m doing in the car with Jonathan Turley’s The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, doesn’t count. That’s not really reading, even if it is fun. Maybe read the Turley book, though. I’ve heard good things.

In any case, take time for a little verse first.

***

ITEM:

On May 4, 1380, Cecelia Chaumpaigne signed a quitclaim releasing Geoffrey Chaucer from “all manner of actions related to my raptus.” That’s a translation. The entire statement was recorded in Latin, as was customary. The word “raptus” is left untranslated and italicized as no one was quite sure exactly which of its uses common as legal terms at the time was intended in this case.

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POETS Day! William Makepeace Thackeray

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I was chatting with a guy from New Jersey yesterday. It was cold and glum in Alabama. He was making fun of me for acting as if temperatures in the thirties were Armageddon-ish and I shook my head and mumbled something like “…wouldn’t last a second around here in August… humidity.”

He showed me an amazing foul weather trick so epoch shaking I might deign to call it a life-hack. “If you are ever bothered by the weather,” he said, “take out your phone, pull up your weather app, and bring up Iowa City, Iowa.” He demonstrated. It was 9° with a blue subscript that read “feels like 7°.”

According to Wikipedia, there are 171,000 people living in the greater Iowa City Metropolitan Area. I don’t know how that’s possible. It’s POETS Day. Look outside. Now look at your phone weather app, type in Iowa City, Iowa, and look outside again. There are 341,000,000 people in this country, and in comparison, no matter what it looked like out that window, 340,829,000 of you just realized what a beautiful day you’ve been blessed with.

It’s Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Have at it.

First, a little verse.

***

I usually come across one or two odd and interesting facts when looking into the lives of poets for these posts, and want as I might, I can’t shoehorn or wrestle them into sense with even the loosest narrative, and I can get pretty loose. I found two this week while reading up on the life of William Makepeace Thackeray and I like them too much to discard. I don’t know if it’s still an aside when you haven’t begun anything to momentarily distract from, but a couple of quick asides if you… whether you mind or not, I guess.

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POETS Day! A Few Poems by Kingsley Amis as Pretense to Discuss One of His Novels

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I don’t like poinsettias and take comfort in the fact that they usually do the honorable thing and die shortly after Christmas time. They’re fine in season I suppose, but so are ugly sweaters and bells on adult shoes.

They’re poisonous flowers, I think. I read that people who don’t like cats but somehow ended up with one buy poinsettias intending to plead ignorance later and get on with their lives. Ours is still in the kitchen thriving in its pot so I daydream about adopting some sort of reverse cat that’s poisonous to poinsettias.

I’m supposed to be encouraging you to take a POETS Day, but I’m distracted by this velveteen-flop looking plant with one petal beginning to wilt and a couple of dozen more that won’t follow its example. I’m distracted like you might be on a Friday afternoon, so preoccupied with weekend thoughts that you can’t get any poinsettia work done, sitting performatively, wasting your time. You should Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Read a poem first.

***

I’ve written about Kingsley Amis in this space numerous times (see here, here, here, and here). I’m an unabashed fan so an unapologetic writer though I don’t claim any “Best” titles for him. There are better novelists, better poets, better editors, and your average park bench made for a better husband. He simply seems to be the writer I like most most of the time.

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POETS Day! The Other Side of James Hogg

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Allan, William; James Hogg (1770-1835), Poet (The Ettrick Shepherd) (The Ettrick Shepherd’s House Heating or The Celebration of his Birthday); National Galleries of Scotland

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

It’s almost another work week gone and there’s no sense in waiting for the official end. Call it a POET’S day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There are books to read, people to meet, shows to catch. Shave a few hours off a Friday and enjoy.

First, a little verse for you.

***

I didn’t know he was a poet.

Until yesterday I knew James Hogg only as the author The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and I don’t know… a lack of curiosity or preoccupation with whatever shiny thing served as a diversion after reading that novel led me elsewhere. I’ll say that his book came to my attention in the first place when I was reading and reading about Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a book that if you’re unfamiliar, either so fascinates you that a third or fourth reading still reveals something new, or you don’t like it much at all.

The mystery writer Ian Rankin wrote his thesis on Miss Jean Brodie and in an interview he said that the main character claimed to be a descendant of Willam Brodie, a respected 18th century cabinet-maker who socialized with all the right sorts of people and spent his evenings burgling Edinburgh. Apparently, locksmithing was folded into the expected duties of a cabinet man in Scotland during the Age of Enlightenment and he kept key copies. It was a scandal when he was caught and chattering about living a double life commenced. The affair was among the inspirations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. According to Stevenson, another was Confessions, a book he said “has always haunted and puzzled me.”

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POETS Day! The Rape of the Lock

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

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.

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