City and Country, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Anarchy in New York: The Mayhem Continues

As we know the tRump misadministration has – for reasons of its own – declared New York City to be a jurisdiction of anarchy, violence and property destruction. This is Part Two. Part One is here. The Justice Department declared New York City A place of Anarchy, violence and Property losses. Live from New York City where folks Continue Their…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW1

A Heap of Broken Images

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW2

Gertrude Stein: Collage and Code

While T.S.Eliot was skulking about in green face powder, Gertrude Stein was communing with Cubists and inventing linguistic collage. And – this is amazing – developing the code book for the Special Operations Executive of WW2.    Picasso was a frequent visitor to Stein’s salon and they became friends. While Picasso and the other Cubists were cutting and pasting and…

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Food, Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

In the Salon with Gertrude Stein

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.– Gertrude Stein  As you know from my earlier post I have recently been chatting with Gertrude Stein about her life and particularly aspects of her work Tender Buttons (1914). This was all facilitated by my early acquaintance with…

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Art, Film, Photography, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

A Little Called Gertrude Stein

There, there, said the parent to the anguished child whose ice cream fell to the gutter. There! There! said the whale watcher pointing at the spout on the horizon. There’s no there there, said Gertrude Stein when she visited Oakland in 1934 and found her childhood home razed to the ground. In what they called an experiment, Stamp and Rave…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Fifth Fact

There’s a move afoot to rename the ten American military bases named for Confederates No more forts named for the traitors and white supremacists of the Confederacy. Here’s Elizabeth Warren on the subject: If they are to be renamed for successful military figures who were not traitors, how about Fort Tubman? Tubman – the first woman to lead an armed…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Sailing Through This to That

May the tide carry you out beyond the face of fear. Three poems for Sunday. Yesterday it snowed and I made tartar sauce – just mayonnaise, lemon juice, mustard and a chopped pickle – to go with the cubes of frozen fish. And today they say the temperature will rise into the 60s F. We have moved from an abundance…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

For Elaine

To a Sewist extraordinaire, with thanks. This is just to say …  . (Pictures to follow once they have been released from cardboard quarantine.) Sew – in anticipation of the opening of the package and – with many apologies to Paul Lawrence Dunbar: We Wear the Masks  We wear the masks that we both chose They hide our cheeks and…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

April and Silence: Three and a Bit from Tomas Tranströmer

Politics without mercy, demonic world events, power without responsibility, nature takes flight. National Insecurity The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles. As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground so the demon merges with the opened newspaper. A helmet worn by no one has taken power. The mother-turtle flees…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Gin: Mother’s Milk or Hair Tonic?

One thing always leads to another on the intertubes and this particular ravel started with my friend David Nice. David is a cultural critic and musicologist who maintains a wonderful blog –  I’ll Think of Something Later – where he writes about music and travel and culture and all the life in between.  In response to my last post he…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Clearing the Clutter

These days find me busy clearing and chucking, sorting and sifting, storing and saving. Three truck loads of stuff cleared by the junk removers, hundreds of books donated to the Poughkeepsie Library and wardrobes full of clothing to the Salvation Army. And still there’s more. As I clear out the clutter and crap and treasure and trove of decades, I…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

Sports Report and the Spots of Time

It’s a late afternoon on a winter Saturday of my childhood. And that means the big Ferguson radio – the one that had the exotic place names on the dial – Hilversum, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Limoges, Toulouse – is warmed up. The fire is lit, the coal scuttle is full and the kettle is on.  And my father – who was…

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Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Decomposition

Decomposition I have a picture I took in Bombay of a beggar asleep on the pavement: grey-haired, wearing shorts and a dirty shirt, his shadow thrown aside like a blanket. His arms and legs could be cracks in the stone, routes for the ants’ journeys, the flies’ descents, Brain-washed by the sun into exhaustion, he lies veined into stone, a…

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Art, Film, Photography, Education, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

For No Good Reason

I love this poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It’s a commentary on the fact that – even in the darkest times – simple acts of unexpected generosity and kindness have the capacity to remind us that not everything is bleak and hopeless even in a nasty, brutish, trumpian world. Optimistic Little Poem Now and then it happens that somebody shouts…

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City and Country, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Wordsworth on the Rail Trail

There’s a drainage ditch runs alongside the rail trail where we often take our morning stroll. It runs with water after rain and provides an excellent damp environment for the cardinal flower (lobelia cardinalis). It’s a showy deep red spiky flower native to the US. Apparently most insects find it difficult to navigate the long tubular flowers so the cardinal…

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