The Man Who Understood the Problem Photo: Harvey Finkle: Tucson 1987 Words: The Financial Times and Kenneth Hudson Diseased English with an assist from William Shakespeare, scissors, and a glue stick.
A Cabinet of Curiosities
Raw, cold, and damp but it’s still good to get out. Thanks to the ongoing lurgy there are no social gatherings, visits, or events to distract us from what is on the doorstep. Like stickybeaking tourists clogging up the sidewalks of a foreign city, we’ve been out and about spotting the everyday marvels and quotidian wonders of the neighborhood. Here’s…
The Sun Like a Force-Ripe Orange
The sun shining … just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange That striking image is from Samuel Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners. Henry Oliver, who earns the nickname Sir Galahad for his bravado, has just arrived from Trinidad. Here he is on that first morning in the big city – in Westbourne Grove – suddenly realizing he is…
An Odd Couple
Two poets in a muddle. Or rather two poems. John Ashbery’s A Mood of Quiet Beauty (from April Galleons 1987) meets T.S.Eliot’s first Prelude (Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917) You can read the originals at those links. In the spirit of OuLiPo – and just for the playful hell of it – I switched out the nouns in each poem in…
Eye-Rhyme Blues
eye rhyme /ˈī ˌrīm/ noun An eye rhyme, also called a visual rhyme or a sight rhyme, is a rhyme in which two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently. A similarity between words in spelling but not in pronunciation, e.g., love and move. This piece of complete silliness started with the Robert Louis Stevenson poem on Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings…
The Consent
I came across “The Consent” when I was exploring Howard Nemerov’s life and work for some other posts. It seems appropriate for about now. The Consent Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind…
Simple Pleasures and Stickybeaking
Stickybeak NOUN: an intrusive, meddlesome, busybody, nosy parker who sticks their nose (beak) into other people’s business. The act of stickybeaking. VERB: to snoop or pry into other’s people’s business. This was a delightful new word for me this week although it’s clearly common currency in Australia and New Zealand. I came across it first in one of a series…
October , Propaganda, and Mrs. Miniver Buys the Chrysanthemums Herself
The Year Begins in October Armistead Maupin based his vignettes of gay life in 1970s San Francisco – Tales of the City – on Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver (1939). They first appeared in a long-running serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Instinctively I wanted to write a gay male Mrs Miniver, the minutiae of gay life with Michael Tolliver as…
Wilt and the #1976Club
Together with a whole lot of other readers in the UK in 1976, I read Wilt – the first in a series of over-the-top, grotesque Tom Sharpe novels about the misadventures of a mild-mannered and hapless tech college teacher named Henry Wilt. He’s a rather fuddy-duddy, decent-enough, beer-drinking, everyman kind of chap given to being misunderstood, especially by his wife…
Attention at Poughkeepsie
“Attention at Poughkeepsie” is how announcements begin over the sound system at Poughkeepsie station. Trains and stations have nothing at all to do with this post although Poughkeepsie has an extremely nice station – built into a rockface and designed by the same people who gave us New York’s Grand Central. No, this post has to do with the signs…
All for Nothing
Hands down, this is the best book I’ve read all year: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. It’s the bitter winter of 1945. An odd assortment of people lives in the Georgenhof – a small neglected estate in East Prussia. Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderführer, a special officer in the German army away in Italy confiscating wine and olive…
Four Little Girls
Carole Robertson (14), Carol Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14) died on September 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded during Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bombing came just days after the federal ruling came for Alabama to integrate the school system. Four Little Girls, September 15, 1963,…
The Ice Caves and the Giant’s Ledges
There’s a stretch on the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail just south of the Binnewater Kilns parking lot in Rosendale that gives access to the crevices that lead to the ice caves deep inside Joppenbergh Mountain. Joppenbergh was mined in the late 19th century for use in the manufacture of natural cement. There was a huge cave-in in 1899 that crushed…
Back-to-School: First Grade
First Grade by Ron Kortgee Until then, every forest had wolves in it, we thought it would be fun to wear snowshoes all the time, and we could talk to water. So who is this woman with the gray breath calling out names and pointing to the little desks we will occupy for the rest of our lives? I read…
One Day in Paris 1919
We’re not likely to be flying anywhere anytime soon so here’s the next best thing: A trip back in time – to 1919 and a 24 hour tour of Paris. Our guide is the poet Hope Mirrlees. In Paris she was the friend of Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, Andre Gide, Paul Valéry and companion/ lover of the Cambridge classicist scholar…