Month: October 2022

10.31.2022 – instead, approached with

instead, approached with
clarity, subjects project
their own poetry

In an article titled, Let there be light: England’s Anglican cathedrals at dawn, about the late Magnum photographer Peter Marlow, Martin Barnes writes:

In 1971, on a trip to Boston during his first year at university as a student of psychology, Marlow visited the Museum of Fine Arts and saw an exhibition of photographs by Walker Evans (1903–1975), curated by John Szarkowski.

Alongside his famous portraits of the rural poor during the Great Depression, Evans’s characteristically precise and intelligent photographic sensibility was often applied to depicting the modern American vernacular: farmhouse interiors, factories, shop signs, roadside warehouses, housing and churches.

Evans avoided the overt stylistic gestures of authorship prevalent in fine-art photography of the time.

Instead, approached with steady and factual clarity, his subjects are allowed to project their own poetry.

Inspired by this encounter with Evans, Marlow purchased a Graflex Speed Graphic camera on his return home, and his career in photography began.

I am not sure, but still pretty sure, that, considering all the writing and interpretation of the photography of Walker Evans, Mr. Barnes summed up Evan’s life and work in one wonderful sentence.

See https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm …

10.30.2022 – He literally

He literally
willed what was in his mind to
be reality

He felt that victory required belief.

As a boy, friends recall, “he was always repeating” the salesman’s credo that “You’ve got to believe in what you’re selling”; decades later, in his retirement, he would say: “What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing; if you don’t, you’re as good as dead.

The other person will sense that something isn’t there.”

And Lyndon Johnson could make himself believe in an argument even if that argument did not accord with the facts, even if it was clearly in conflict with reality.

He “would quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true,” his aide Joseph Califano would write.

“It was not an act,” George Reedy would say.

“He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies.

He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.”

He would refuse to hear any facts which conflicted with that “reality,” to listen to anyone who disagreed with him.

(Robert A. Caro. The Passage of Power (2012). Knopf. Kindle Edition.)

Is there something in the water at the White House?

Or in Washington, DC, overall?

The author Jim Harrison once wrote something along the lines of asking that when you consider the buildings and such in Washington, DC, how could elected officials NOT become pompous?

Mr. Harrison recommended turning the Capitol into a museum and setting Congress up in a pole barn in Anacostia and then watch how long it took for the Government to make things happen.

I second the notion with the added stipulation of no air conditioning.

.

10.29.2022 – I wear the chain I

I wear the chain I
forged in life – I made it link
by link yard by yard

“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.

“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free-will, and of my own free-will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”

Scrooge trembled more and more.

“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas-eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!”

To sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him.

From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, New York The Platt & Peck Co. Copyright, 1905, by The Baker & Taylor Company

We, all of us, today, are paying the price for decisions made long ago.

10.27.2022 – there’s a collective

there’s a collective
that whole machine all making
each other’s money

In the article, Deranged diners, inflation and staff shortages: American restaurants are struggling, by Rachel Sugar, Ms. Sugar writes:

“It really does change the way the restaurant works,” says Sophie, 30, a longtime server at a casual fine-dining restaurant in Lower Manhattan, who estimates that about a third of people working front of house are new since the pandemic.

(To speak freely, she asked to be identified by her first name only.) “It changes the culture.” It is perhaps less united that it used to be, divided by default into an old guard and a new guard, “which is kind of the opposite of what I would want in a restaurant culture, which would be solidarity and inclusivity”, she says.

Jones, a classical cellist by training, likens restaurants to orchestras. “There’s all these components, but there’s a collective as well,” he says. “That whole machine is what is able to accomplish things. No one part is more important.”

Or as Sophie, whose restaurant pools tips, puts it, less romantically: “We’re all making each other’s money.

10.26.2022 – sound of time ticking

sound of time ticking
Mr. Lincoln’s pocket watch
echoes across ages

It has been 10 years since the movie Lincoln came out.

I am not sure what made me think of it but, if you remember, they made a big deal about trying to get ‘sounds’ that Lincoln heard.

They went so far as to search out Mr. Lincoln’s watches and found that two were available in museums that experts agreed were part of Mr. Lincoln’s daily routine.

One watch was in the Smithsonian and the other was in the care of the Kentucky Historical Society.

The Kentucky people allowed sound technicians to wind the watch and record the ticking.

The ticking is heard in the movie for about 3 seconds.

Like I said, I got to thinking and after thinking about it, I got to work.

I messed around and downloaded a video file of the movie.

I found the scene and removed the audio.

I tried to clean out any other sounds from the background music.

There is an occasional loud clock tick-tock but I let that stay as I learned it was recorded from a clock that had been in the White House with the Lincolns.

But the tic-tic-ticking is there.

The 3 seconds of the sound of time that echoes across ages.

I then copied the clip over and over until I had 70 seconds of ticking.

It was kind of creepy.

It was kind of cool.

Hear it for yourself by clicking here.

10.26.2022 – do what they think in

do what they think in
faithful disinterested
judgement what is right

In a 1955 document titled, Modernisation of the House of Commons – First Report, contributed to by Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Mr. Churchill said that:

The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what they think in their faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. The second duty is to their constituents, of whom they are the representative but not the delegate. Burke’s famous declaration on this subject is well known. It is only in the third place that their duty to party organisation or programme takes rank. All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Let me put that in bullet points.

  • The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what they think in their faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain.
  • The second duty is to their constituents, of whom they are the representative but not the delegate.
  • It is only in the third place that their duty to party organisation or programme takes rank.

All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Let me, repeat part of that last line.

But there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Change Parliament to Congress is easy.

But then you also have to change the last line to read, There is no doubt of the order in which they stand under this current un-healthy manifestation of democracy.

10.25.2022 – men make their history

men make their history
do not make it as they please
chosen by the past

Adapted from, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx  between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City and established by Joseph Weydemeyer. 

According to Wikipedia, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon discusses the French coup of 1851 in which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers. It shows Marx in his form as a social and political historian, treating actual historical events from the viewpoint of his materialist conception of history.

The title refers to the Coup of 18 Brumaire in which Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in revolutionary France (9 November 17s99, or 18 Brumaire Year VIII in the French Republican Calendar), in order to contrast it with the coup of 1851.

Mr. Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.“

Commenting on the changes brought on by the coup attempt, Marx writes:

” … fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned,

their houses bombarded for amusement –

in the name of property,

of the family,

of religion,

and of order.

Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero installs himself in the Tuileries as the “savior of society.”

Of course, that was then in the 1850’s.

It would never happen here.

It would never happen now.

History doesn’t repeat itself but historians do, still it seems like what goes around comes around.

10.23.2022 – finding fresh udon

finding fresh udon
can be an impossible task
for many people

Even though, truth be told, I am not familiar with the name, Kenji López-Alt, I was attracted to recipe/article with the headline What Kenji López-Alt Makes His Family for Dinner.

What caught my attention was the sub headline, If you can boil water, slice an onion and use a strainer, you can make niku udon, a Japanese beef noodle soup that is the cookbook author’s go-to weeknight dinner.

It caught my attention because I can boil water.

It caught my attention because I can slice an onion.

It caught my attention because I can use a strainer.

I am not un-at home in the kitchen.

(Typing un-at home immediately brings to mind the once-upon-a-time 1950’s Republican created House Un-American Activities Committee, better known as HUAC … apple don’t fall far from the tree now does it, but I digress)

As I was saying, I am comfortable in the kitchen.

Give me a pack of boneless chicken thighs, spuds and some flour and in one hour I’ll conjure up a southern fried chicken dinner with mashed potatoes, biscuits and gravy that will make you cry ur eyes out it’s so good.

Honor bright!

Still, any recipe that starts off with if you can boil water is a recipe for me.

But as I read through the recipe it was evident quickly that If you can boil water, slice an onion and use a strainer, you can make niku udon was not exactly the case.

Turns out that Mr. Kenji López-Alt is a renowned chef.

According to Wikipedia, … often known simply as Kenji, is an American chef and food writer. His first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, became a critical and commercial success, charting on the New York Times Bestseller list and winning the 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for the best General Cooking cookbook.

This is not to say that you need a superior skill set beyond boiling, slicing and straining.

What you DO NEED though is a fridge full of leftovers and other supplies not found in my kitchen.

The skill set to boil water, slice an onion and use a strainer is not in question.

But what you boil, what you slice like an onion and what you strain is.

I grew in Grand Rapids, Michigan and once I tried to make the signature soup at a local restaurant. Charley’s Crab, called Charley’s Chowder.

I drove all over Grand Rapids looking for clam juice.

Then I relocated to Atlanta, Georgia.

Little known fact about Atlanta is that is one of the largest Korean cities in the world and they have the Korean stores to prove it.

They have H Mart, the Korean version of Walmart.

If you can cook it, you can find it at H Mart.

Now I live in the low country of South Carolina.

It isn’t Podunk.

To get here, you go to Podunk and turn left.

I am, at this moment, working the local Kroger to carry Black Cherry Kool Aid, the best flavor of chemical created non-fruit related beverages ever developed by the laboratories of General Foods.

If I can’t black cherry koolaid in my neighborhood, chances don’t look good for the other ingredients.

The article admits this.

The writer states “For a dish that’s so technically easy, finding ingredients like kiriotoshi outside Japan is the biggest barrier to entry.“

Kiriotoshi?

I kept reading past this to find if there was some other easy secret to this dish.

It has to be simple somewhere along the line if Kenji López-Alt makes this for his family for dinner.

Then I hit the line, Finding fresh udon can be an impossible task for many people, even in major cities.

I mean this is a dish, I imagine, that after a long day in the food lab, Mr. Kenji López-Alt looks at the wife and says, I am so tired. Is it okay if I whip up a pot of niku udon and just go to bed?

Finding fresh udon can be impossible for many people!

Oh

Please tell me the people who CAN find fresh udon and we can go from there.

Why doesn’t the headline read If you can find some udon, boil water, slice an onion and use a strainer, you can make niku udon?

Finding fresh udon can be impossible for many people, for me is metaphor of today.

I think as I go forward into this year and I watch the news and read the headlines, I will say to myself, yes and finding fresh udon can be impossible for many people!

Anyone else remember Steve Martin’s claim you could make a million dollars (back when that was a lot of money) and not pay any taxes?

It starts with “First, make a million dollars. Then …”*

At least I know what a million dollars is.

Even if I was in Atlanta and could walk into H Mart, I don’t know what udon is.

Finding fresh udon can be impossible for many people.

No kidding.

10.22.2022 – crisis on top of

crisis on top of
crisis – crises cheaper
when you buy in bulk

I started this blog and daily haiku as a salute to words, usage and the English language.

That it has turned into my rant platform over the current state of affairs, political and otherwise in this country is not my plan nor my fault.

I just want to say that I start each day looking for that bit of unique wordplay in life that makes me want to say something about the writers writing.

That this often turns into a political rant … well, I guess that is where the best writing is going these days.

Like something close to what Michael Corelone said, “… every time I think I am out, they keep pulling me back.“

And as Will Rogers said, “All I know is what I read in the papers.”

That being said, I read in the paper this morning:

The USA is in a political crisis layered on top of an economic crisis, which itself has needlessly exacerbated an already dire cost-of-living crisis.

The idea that the answer to a single part of this horror show is to bring back a morally degenerate financial incontinent who broke his own laws is something that tells you everything about the terminal sad-sacks who are so much as thinking of it.

The formal investigation into the last truth-aborting period in office is about to begin; if it ends up censuring someone for misleading Congress on January 6, as is perfectly likely, then we’d be in a constitutional crisis too.

Maybe crises are cheaper when you buy in bulk.

So I lied.

I didn’t read this this morning.

What I read was the article, Tories on their knees – and here comes Boris Johnson. Dear reader, look away by Marina Hyde this morning in the Guardian.

What she said was:

The UK is in a political crisis layered on top of an economic crisis, which itself has needlessly exacerbated an already dire cost-of-living crisis. The idea that the answer to a single part of this horror show is to bring back a morally degenerate financial incontinent who broke his own laws is something that tells you everything about the terminal sad-sacks who are so much as thinking of it. The formal parliamentary investigation into Johnson’s last truth-aborting period in office is about to begin; if it ends up censuring him for misleading parliament over the No 10 lockdown parties, as is perfectly likely, then we’d be in a constitutional crisis too. Maybe crises are cheaper when you buy in bulk.

I changed a few nouns to adjust for Greenwich Mean Time and there we are on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was Oscar Wilde who wrote, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

I think of how in my parents time, the two countries shared Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

It’s just not fair.