In the Summertime

Collections and Clutter, 101 cookbooks, cont.

Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipes and Reflections - Edward Espe Brown

Tao Te Ching

Weapons are the tools of violence;
all decent men detest them.

Cooking

Sometimes you prepare a dish you have prepared a thousand times and this time it doesn't work out. That happened tonight. Same ingredients. Same method. Not as good. So tomorrow I have to run around looking for something to correct the problem. In this case, the spaghetti sauce just doesn't have a strong tomato flavor. Why?

Monday, Bloody Monday

Trying to keep on the walk/run/walk rhythm.
Trying to keep on the make-at-least-one-tasty-dish-a-day-rhythm.
Trying to keep on the sunny side rhythm.

I've got rhythm
I've got music.
I've got sunshine.
Who could ask for anything more?

Happy Gay Pride Day!

Flower

Flower
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Like a sea anemone bereft of water
or triumphant like the
primal amphibian deciding, reluctantly,
to breathe

Cat Friday

Isabella On a Lap
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Rain Clouds

Rain Clouds
Originally uploaded by vajra.

The Sky Is Falling

and the bottom has fallen from my castle in the sky.

Frist Is Duhbya's Bitch

Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.

Star Crossed Angel

Star Crossed Angel
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Lovely face gazing at the sky.
She wears a star in her hair.

Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form

1.

Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet
are bronze casts of the former queen's feet its sheen
a sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through
where the marble is worn away with industrious
polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say
because the queen does not want room for splashing
the maid thinks otherwise she knows the king
does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are
others the queen does not have lovers she obeys
her mother once told her your ancestry is your only
support then is what she gets in the bathtub she floats
never holds her nose and goes under not because
she might sink but because she knows to keep her ears
above water she smiles at the circle of courtiers below her
feet are kicking against walls which cannot give
satisfaction at best is to manage to stay clean

2.

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the whims of
one man loves but is not loved in return by the object
of his affection there is little to tell of his profession
there is more for it is because he works with glass
that he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable
(she does not love) he knows how to take something
small and hard and hot and make room for his breath
quickens at night as he dreams of her body he wants
to create a present unlike any other and because he cannot
hold her he designs something that can a bathtub out of
glass shimmers red when it is hot he pours it into the mold
in a rush of passion only as it begins to cool does it reflect
his foolishness enrages him as he throws off his clothes meaning
to jump in and lie there but it is still too hot and his feet propel
him forward he runs from one end to the other then falls
to the floor blisters begin to swell on his soft feet he watches
his pain harden into a pretty pattern on the bottom of the bath

3.

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human
form may define external appearance but there is room
for improvement within try a soap dish that allows for
slippage is inevitable as is difference in the size of
the subject may hoard his or her bubbles at different
ends of the bathtub may grasp the sponge tightly or
loosely it may be assumed that eventually everyone gets in
the bath has a place in our lives and our place is
within it we have control of how much hot how much cold
what to pour into it how long we want to stay when to
return though is inevitable because we need something
to define ourselves against even if we know that
whenever we want to we can pull the plug and get out
which is not the case with our own tighter confinement
inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too

--Matthea Harvey

Rethuglicans Make Me Want To Puke

But others give me hope. Check it out.

Cat Friday

The Cheshire Cat
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Oh my luve is like the melodie

Oh my luve is like the melodie
Originally uploaded by vajra.

The roses are waning. Or at any rate, not in their early Spring abundance. Rain last week and today so the cherry crop is ruined. Lots of loss.

"Though nothing can bring back
The splendour in the grass,
The glory in the flower,
We will grieve not,
Rather find truth in what remains behind."

Fuschia

Fuschia
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Taking a walk in my neighborhood is a chance to walk toward heaven.

New Rule

Leila (courtesy San Francisco Opera)
Originally uploaded by vajra.

All French operas will be minimally staged with no effort to make sense of the libretto.

Collections and Clutter, cont.101cookbooks

It's time to start my own list of cookbooks, particularly since I've been in a cooking frame of mind for the last week or so. I'll start at random and then add titles as I have the time or inclination.

From a Monastery Kitchen - Elise Boulding with Brother Victor Avila
From a Monastery Kitchen: Revised Edition - Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila- Latourrette
This Good Food - Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette
Twelve Months of Monastery Soups - Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette
Tassajara Cooking - Edward Espe Brown
The Tassajara Bread Book - Edward Espe Brown
The Tassajara Recipe Book: Favorites of the Guest Season - Edward Espe Brown
The Vegetarian Epicure - Anna Thomas
The Vegetarian Epicure, Book Two - Anna Thomas
108 Recipes: Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking from Nyingma Institute - Nyingma Institute

This Can't Be Tofu - Deborah Madison
The Greens Cook Book - Deborah Madison
The Savory Way - Deborah Madison
Cooking With Conscience - Alice Benjamin and Harriett Corrigan
The Rancho La Puerta Cookbook - Bill Wavrin
Potager: Fresh Garden cooking In the French Style - Georgeanne Brennan
Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook - Alice Waters
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook - Alice Waters
Chez Panisse Desserts - Lindsey Remolif Shere
Pomp And Sustenance - Mary Taylor Simeti

The Open Hand Cookbook - Robert C. Schneider
Mastering the Art of French Cooking - Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II - Julia Child and Simone Beck
Simca's Cuisine - Simone Beck
The Way to Cook - Julia Child
The Cooking of South-West France - Paula Wolfert
The New Basics Cookbook - Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins
Great Good Food - Julee Rosso
Fresh Start - Julee Rosso
Good Food Book - Jane Brody

From a Baker's Kitchen - Gail Sher

The Queen of Spades

"Pique Dame" courtesy of Welsh National Opera
Originally uploaded by vajra.

The music was gorgeous! The young cast outdid expectations and at times verged on the glorious. I particularly liked Katarina Dalayman as Lisa, Katherine Rohrer as Paulina, and John Hancock as Prince Yeletsky. While there were two or three gaffes in the production (it must be a director's nightmare to hear tittering from the audience, particularly at a solemnly dramatic moment), the production was tight and interesting.

A wonderful afternoon.

Window

Window
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Only a year ago and so much has changed.





All that is solid melts into air.

Cat Friday

Isabella
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Isabella In the Sun

What Is Your Feather?

Ask yourself what do you have that reminds you of your happiness?


Today, I can't find a feather, so I'll just be a feather. A feather on the breath of God.

COLLECTIONS AND CLUTTER, cont.

I love making soups. I have quite a collection of soup recipes which I've incorporated into my cooking repertoire over the years.
Carrot Soup.
Curried Carrot Soup.
Gazpacho.
Mushroom Barley.
Minestrone.
Potato Soup.
Potato Leek Soup.
Potato Chile Cheese Soup.
Pumpkin Soup.
Onion Soup.
Three Bean Soup.
Lentil Soup.
Lovely, lovely soup...
In fact, this past Sunday, I realized that making soup makes me happy. I made three bean soup, gazpacho, and minestrone. Chopping the vegetables. Placing them in the olive oil to bring out their flavor and fragrance. Mixing things together. Punting if there's an ingredient missing. Sipping to get the seasoning right. And when I'm finished there's a pot of beautiful soup to comfort and regale my stomach. What delight.

Thatched Hut

let wind leap
twist
wild

distant

while
hearts tremble
break

within

Wings Of Desire

Lied Vom Kindsein
– Peter Handke

Als das Kind Kind war,
ging es mit hängenden Armen,
wollte der Bach sei ein Fluß,
der Fluß sei ein Strom,
und diese Pfütze das Meer.

Als das Kind Kind war,
wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen waren eins...



*****


Song of Childhood
By Peter Handke

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one...

COLLECTIONS AND OTHER CLUTTER

Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters, or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any of a thousand other things including bruises, most of them satisfying, depending on the genes and the bank account and where the heart lies.

My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages. Sunrises are usually handsome, they can't possibly be dusted, and they take only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from. Moreover, I can't give way to the urge to show off my collection to my friends. I can only talk about it, and they needn't listen.

__PEG BRACKEN

PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO

Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can't be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

That's for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you're in love and somebody's mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don't say, "Hey, you can't hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may after a few months. But that's not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I'm not saying that I don't have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They're just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I've stopped thinking and that's when refreshment arrives.

But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you're experiencing is "yearning."

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé).

Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poési pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding than Dubuffet's to painting.

What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.

Frank O'Hara
September 3, 1959

Cat Friday

Slightly Different Isabella

Hot Day; Flowers Fading

ORGANIZATION

I'm in the process of organizing two rooms. One room is almost done. The other can't even be described as a work in progress. I want it to be a guest room with some library/office functions. But how? It's a really large room with lots of light but no insulation. Freezing in winter. Boiling in summer...and paper...paper...paper...




Paper is the real problem. No matter what I do, I can't seem to get a handle on it. What to do?
I'm blogging this photo again to remind myself that I've been at this point before.