Lines composed over three thousand miles from Tinturn Abbey

In Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tinturn Abbey, Billy Collins writes:

I was here before, a long time ago,
and now I am here again
is an observation that occurs in poetry
as frequently as rain occurs in life

and much of the rest of the poem is about

But the feeling is always the same.
It was better the first time.
This time is not nearly as good.
I'm not feeling as chipper as I did back then.

Which, I know, is an awfully common feeling.  More common than rain.  But I don't feel it.

Dear diary, where I been?

No where much.  Where the weak are eaten, mostly, and a quick trip to DC.  Lota been to Sundance and back.  Been working working working.  Floundered in the midst of a half dozen books and finally pulled myself out by the bootstraps of The Sense of an Ending and Flaubert's Parrot.  Have been enjoying some home made vermouth a la Yvette can Boven and been slicing the bresaola.  Almost bought an electric slicer but settled instead on the big honkin' Victrinox Forschner hollow edged knife.  And I have a pork belly working, too.  Burned last year's seasonal stalks and saw that the bulbs and mint and a few other early-risers are saying hello.  Saw in the times today that I'm three years younger than Cindy Sherman.

 

I fixed my pen. Maybe everything will change, again?

About six months ago I broke the most expensive pen I'd ever bought - a yellow Aurora.  When I did that I stopped writing a long-hand diary, and switched to writing at a keyboard - my diary entries got longer, more daily, and I also just about stopped any sort of posting to public sites.  About an hour ago I borrowed some crazy glue and reconstructed the pen.  (I should have taken photos, but didn't think to.)  And I have an urge to post about it.

That reminds me: I brought an old pair of Clarks into the shoemaker today to have new crepe soles put on. 

First fireflies of the year, and something smells dead

First yesterday morning in the back yard one flew drunkenly into a flowerpot.  Then last evening, a couple sparking under the shad bush out front.  Meanwhile, there's the smell of something dead in the front of the house.  First, a couple of days ago, from behind the radiator or under the floorboards as you walked into the house.  Now, this morning, closer to the wall by the entry way, between the door and the living room.  I can smell it while sitting in the big chair we've promised to the silver fox.

Realizing that posts with long titles and little content are like Twitter

So, what's the problem?

Hurdy Gurdy Man - I could not resist

This was posted on Rhizome as a comment to Brian Khek's Venus With Drop Shadow.  (Sounds like a random generator sentence, no?)  I couldn't resist posting it here.

The last time I went to London for work was quite a while ago now.  Five years?  I put up in a too big too fancy place not far from my office, and the fire alarms kept sounding through the night.  At some point I was very cranky, very jet lagged, and I worked out Hurdy Gurdy Man (and then Atlantis) on my uke.   Of course, if I'd been carrying a computer instead of my uke, I could have just gone to donochords.  And hummed.

The table, my seat...

So, here's something I've noticed.  The table we eat our meals at, I call "the table".  I don't really have very warm feelings for it.  I'm not sure why.  It's perfectly good, and other people seem to like it.  I must have liked it pretty well when we first bought it, I guess about 14 or 15 years ago. 

There's a seat at the table I think of as Lori's seat, and a seat at the table I think of as "my seat", and they are opposite each other.  I sit in my seat at dinner time, when Lori sits in her seat.  When we have lunch at home, Lori sits in her seat, and I sit in the seat at the end of the table to her left, which seems closer to her than my seat does, and that seems right for lunch.  When Lori's not home for dinner and I sit at the table, I sit either in her seat or in the seat I sit in at lunch, but not in my seat. 

I just about never sit at the seat at the other end of the table, and I don't really know why.  It just seems like that would be wrong.  That's the seat I most often drape a coat or sweater over, if I'm going to do that sort of thing.  Lori often will drape a coat over her seat: I'll always move the coat from her seat to the seat at the far end of the table, when she's not in the room.

I thought about this a few mornings ago.  I woke at 4 and decided to stay up and read, and my mind wandered.  I think it was the morning I finished reading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, which is very beautiful and simple and sad and has an improbably happy ending, improbable but you feel it's somehow deserved and you just go with it.  I dozed off again at 5:30 or so, and woke again at 6 and thought that there was something I was thinking about that I wanted to jot down, but I couldn't remember what it was.  I remembered that I thought it wasn't really the type of thing I usually write about in my journal, so maybe I would post it, but that's all I could remember.  Then last night or this morning I remembered what it was I was thinking, then I forgot again.  Then I remembered, and it's not that I think now I should post it, but I just made the new image with the third eyes for the Dante banner, and I need some text to separate the banner from the image I posted the other day - almost the same image, minus Dante.  So.

My hat...

Best use for stick match. Ever.

Dude, don't light it.  NYPL Digital Collections. 

Image Title
:  Foreign body in eye.

Standard Reference
: Cartophilic reference books W62-79-b

Source
: [Cigarette cards.] / First aid

Location
: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building / George Arents Collection

Catalog Call Number
: Arents Cigarette Cards 865

Digital ID
: 1570037

Record ID
: 800370

Digital Item Published
: 4-26-2007; updated 6-25-2010

Dear diary, my sweet paprika:

Dear diary, wassup?

Woke this morning and went downstairs to make coffee and stepped in front of the sink onto the little rug we keep there and it was soaked through.  Uh-oh.  After some quality time crawling around and emptying all of the stuff that's accumulated under there and drying things and watching where new puddles formed it became pretty clear the hose at the back of the dishwasher must be where the water's coming from.  Shut the cut-off valve and am gonna leave it that way for the day and not let it harsh my my Labor Day weekend mellow.  (This same dishwasher is wedged tightly under a soapstone counter that's a little too shallow for it, and it took some imaginative work to get the puppy under there.  So it doesn't come out real easy.  About 5 years (10?) when the latch to the to machine busted I decided to replace the broken part with a light, long machine bolt.  Problem was, the latch also acts as something of an electrical switch or lock, so whenever I drove the bolt into place, current would run through it and I'd get a pretty jimmying shock.  But because the washer is so wedged in, I decided not to try to pull it out to get to the electrical connection and unplug it.  Then for the better part of an hour I kept repeating a cycle of screwing up my courage, fiddling the bolt, getting jimmied until I couldn't hold on to it, and weeping as it slid back out of place.  Eventually I got it set, but not before two of my teeth had turned to soap.  And I can still put a q-tip half way into my left ear before it hits anything solid.)

Made coffee and went into the back with, darned chilly compared to what it's been.  Sudden bird-quiet, too, except for the cardinals which where futzing in the grapes.  Just last night we were saying how last year there was a heck of a lot of feeding in the grapes and shitting of totally psychedelic guano.  (I see now it was last Labor Day's post.  Gee.  With pics.)

Then back inside to put a batch of Hungarian peppers in the oven to dry.  I've been wanting to do this since last year when I bought a precious little jar of paprika from Bradley and as I was paying RB himself said, Why don't you make it yourself?  Wella wella.  So yesterday instead of buying paprika from Bradley we bought paprika peppers.  Maggy's Farm has a nice post about making your own.

Da Savino will be over in a couple of hours to bottle the last of his family's Grenache from last year so we can free up come ore carboys.  Lot and I have been concentrating a lot on this year's making, and buying a bunch of new equipment, as B has moved off to Staten Island and will be making his own wine there with the ancestral equipment.  Gonna have to change my pants before we bottle.  Threw on a pair of MK jeans that I bought on a whim a week or two ago at a discount place.  They're nice, but the distance between the top of the jeans way down there and my belly button way up here is interesting. 

By.  Good talking to you again.  Say hi.

Fictive whiff of fresh air. And grapes.

Somehow, even though it deals with many of the same issues, reading Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year seems like a whiff of fresh air after reading the very well written The Value of Nothing, by Raj Patel, and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, by Amitava Kumar.  At heart, I'm still just a fiction boy after all these years.  (Also read the two non-fiction books on various e-readers, and am reading the Coetzee in glorious paper.  See the McSweeney's article Juju pointed us to yesterday: After a Thorough Battery of Tests We Can Now Recommend "The Newspaper" As the Best e-Reader On the Market.)  And, yes, I put Diary in the same red paper cover I had used for Island at The Center of the World.  Thanks for asking.

About the grapes: yesterday morning at 5 AM I was out back and smooshed some while I was walking around and realized that I was surrounded with the smell of ripe grapes.  Woof.

Horrible slug death

Just last night, the okra corn hot pepper thing cooked and cooling, I sat on the back bench under the crab-apple tree, surveying our one-rod manse, thinking, Gee, there haven't been any slugs this year.

That was obviously a big psychokinetic booboo.  Because this morning, sitting out with coffee at the edge of the patio and admiring that same bench and tree in reverse view, I lolled my head to the right and there on the wall of Joann's place, not 12 inched from my schnoz, was a big friggin' slug-daddy, a real man-sized slug, a full grown index finger of slug, a slug that if it got into your nostril or throat would undoubtedly suffocate you, you would die horribly between asphyxiation and uncontrollable gut wrenching gag reflex.  Do I make myself clear?

Skank!

I quick footed into the kitchen and came out with a handful of salt (it happened to be Kosher salt) and poured that on the beast, which immediately started exuding heroic quantities of snot and writhed in what a human could only sanely interpret as pain.  Intense, deadass pain.  But it wouldn't drop.  I got another handful.  It dropped.  A little while later it was dead.  I felt ambivalent about that and what I had done, but went back to coffee and Jim Harrison. 

Time got later, I needed to ready myself for work.  I started to stand, put down my bare right foot from where it was resting on an old stool... and missed by two inches another friggin' slug.  A smaller one, practically lithe, the size of a young child's pinkie.  I imagined that eeeuuuwwww feeling I would have had if I'd stepped on it barefoot, smooshing it, and I had an involuntary sphincter tightening reaction.  I went inside.

The lesser calico

This morning I gave up sleeping at 4:30 and went out back to read (Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked).  As the sky brightened one of the two calico cats that live in the gap between our place and Lula & Vincent's, the less athletic one - they are strikingly different this way - came walking in from the back of the garden heading for the gap.  For years there has been a thin space between where our fence meets our kitchen, and this cat would slip through it on her way to the gap.  Last weekend, though, I repaired that part of the fence.  Now this cat slinks onto the patio (we don't like each other), leaps to our kitchen window sill, then up to the top of the fence, then backtracks 5 feet to where there's a clear spot to drop down, then walks to the gap on Lula's side of our fence.    Her more able sister just leaps to the top of the repaired fence and then straight down into the narrow space behind.

And when he was walking away from his car he noticed...

Sent via thingy

This is my tasting spoon

The tasting spoon is all about rule number three:  taste what you are cooking.  (Rule number one is to not pass up an offered drink of water, and rule number two - more important in my older age - is to not pass up an opportunity to use the toilet.)  It's revolutionized my life.

Busted and ratted out

130 people at the house a few weeks ago for the annual big doo, and just about the only thing broken was my blue glass garden ball.  Broken on purpose by one of the kids at the party, who was immediately ratted out by other kids.  And, Lori, he broke it on purpose!  Been meaning since then to photograph it, I don't know why, but now I have and now I can say goodbye to it.

I got bounce

I've been away from baking bread a bit, but got the bug again this morning.  And having just finished Outlaw Cook (Thorne) and being a little ways in to Pot on the Fire, I felt a little freer to follow my natural inclinations rather than following a scale and ratio as I had been when reading Ruhlman.

So, in I dove, and true to my mood I grabbed the drinking glasses I've recently been using instead of measuring cups.  I've learned which glasses are just about a cup, which little spice dishes (I call them eye-cups, in my head)  are a quarter cup.  And I decided I'd use as much water as the flour seemed to want, rather than measuring it at all.  I had let my starter die (or am guessing I did: I haven't feed it in a month and I didn't go look because I didn't want to clean the jar) so I used commercial yeast.  And I did everything by hand rather than by hook or blade.  Last, I decided to bake on my pizza stone and to not add steam to the oven (by tossing water onto a cast-iron skillet in the bottom of the stove - it' hell on the skillet and it scorches my eyeballs).

I guess what.  I got bounce!  Big whoppin' cross-splitting bounce.  Hadn't been seeing that in my bread.  Was it the stone?  Better kneading?  Not steaming?  The weather?  My mood?  Not splurting my energies out into posting?  Now I just want to have grilled cheese and wine in the back yard for dinner.

Chips, chips, happy feet

Yes, I did start Love and Sleep, but I'm also taking a simultaneous detour through John and Matt Thorne's Outlaw Cook, which has been on our shelf for years but never read.  Seeing this post by Thorne at Bittman - Eating with my mother - made me remember and want to read the book.  My idol's idol.

Anyway, Thornesque, last night I set out to make Lori's favorite chicken dish for her to have late when she flew back home (chicken a la Lori, we call it.  or, sometimes, chicken with scallion ginger sauce, rice and edamame) and along the way (here's the Thornesque part) I cleared the fridge of some past-their-prime shiitake, ramps and scallions.  These three I did up in too much olive oil at too high a heat and them salted the heck out of them (chips!  chips!) and wolfed them down hot standing next to the stove.  Ahhhh.  Happy feet.

Re Thorne's name: I've always misremembered it as Thane, which always makes me remember our old friend, Jane Thane of Ohio.  Or Jane, Thane of Ohio, which she secretly was, who's collected works on Amazons is no longer available.

Re Paolo Conte's Happy Feet.

Can I have a couple of omens, please?

On what was otherwise a sort of grim day in my skull, I found in the trash on 7th Ave a lovely 50's Harmony baritone uke, waiting to be rescued, just like the one Jake restored at Antebellum Instruments, right down to the tortoise binding; and, the fabulous SbArNuDcIeE wrote to say they'll be at the big Puttanesca & new wine bash in June.  Cheer up!  Turn this thing around.  Accentuate the positive!

Can dreams predict the future?

Juju dropped a note from the Berkeley hills to ask if that Gorilla Coffee uprising wasn't in our neighborhood here in the Brooklyn slopes, and I had to smile because (a) Yes, (b) we'd bought the silverbacked correspondent Gorilla gear and coffee before and put it in one of the never-mailed packets to him (later broken into for our own drinking, but I see there is still a double X Ike Turner T-shirt there...), and (c) I was just then brewing a little stovetop pot of coffee, not Gorilla because we'd used the last of it a day or two before and were switching to some very nice Italian gift coffee for a while.  This was all on that fine last Saturday, and I was sitting out back, but near the kitchen door and window and I could hear the coffee finishing, but was surprised not to smell it doing so.  Guess what?  When I went to pour, there was no there there.  Someone (!) forgot to add the coffee to the coffee pot.  Pretty sure I'd never done that before, and I had to wait a bit for the heat and vacuum of the Bialetti ease off before I could start again.  So, back out back where (d) I was finishing this decade's reading of Little Big, where someone (!) who had oft described this book as one of his favorites was in the end-throes of being shocked that he remembered the first 50 pages really well, and the last 25 pretty well, and was deep under water in vaguery about most of the intervening 500 or so.  How does that happen?  Why does it keep happening to moi? 

Anyway, I didn't weep over Smokey's death this decade.  I think maybe I've come to wear my own Smokeyness more comfortably.  We'll take another look in 2020 (and see, nyuk nyuk).  (Nyuk nyuk.  Who's there?)

And here's why I'm posting: to say that one of the films Lori (Lori Cheatle!) produced this past year, Amy Hardie's fab The Edge of Dreaming got itself written about glowingly at the Huffington Post, by Karin Badt: Can Dreams Predict the Future? Amy Hardie's New Documentary.