2.6.2022 – all vowel effects

all vowel effects
all the consonant effects
variations sound

In an interview in 1963, Conrad Aiken said about training himself to be a poet, he replied:

I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort -I mean I didn’t give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form – all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I’ve always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. And to study all the vowel effects and all the consonant effects and the variation in vowel sounds.

Reading poetry for the sounds, the form.

Just the sounds of the words in the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms.

Mr. Aiken wrote in his “The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light“

Good night! good night! good night! we go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
We walk, we run, we ride. We turn our faces
To what the eternal evening brings.

Mr. Aiken is buried here in Savannah’s St. Bonaventure Cemetery and is celebrated as ‘Savannah’s Own’ much like Johnny Mercer if maybe in a less celebrated way.

It was interesting to read in that interview that Mr. Aiken was asked, “I see you listed occasionally as a Southern writer. Does this make any sense to you?“

And he replied, “Not at all. I’m not in the least Southern; I’m entirely New England. Of course, the Savannah ambiente made a profound impression on me. It was a beautiful city and so wholly different from New England that going from South to North every year, as we did in the summers, provided an extraordinary counterpoint of experience, of sensuous adventure. The change was so violent, from Savannah to New Bedford or Savannah to Cambridge, that it was extraordinarily useful. But no, I never was connected with any of the Southern writers.”

The next question was, “In what way was the change from Savannah to New England “useful” to you?”

“Shock treatment, I suppose: the milieu so wholly different, and the social customs, and the mere transplantation; as well as having to change one’s accent twice a year—all this quite apart from the astonishing change of landscape. From swamps and Spanish moss to New England rocks.“

Mr. Aiken left out snow.

2.3.2022 – got more yesterday

got more yesterday
than anybody we need some
kind of tomorrow

Toni Morrison writes in her book, Beloved, “Sethe,” he says, “‘me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” His holding fingers are holding hers.

The very next passage in the book is:

There is a loneliness that can be rocked.

Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker.

It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin.

Then there is a loneliness that roams.

No rocking can hold it down.

It is alive, on its own.

A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

It is difficult to try and say anything based on the the book Beloved that does not from me, seem trivialize the writing of Ms. Morrison.

I mean to try and put myself in a place where anything I write should even be allowed on the same page as Ms. Morrison is a tremendous amount of cheek.

Mr. Hemingway writes something along the lines that if you can write about a something in a way that it becomes part of the consciousness of the reader, then you are, indeed, a writer.

By that standard, Ms. Morrison is indeed a writer, understanding that it is me applying Mr. Hemingway’s standard as I have no standing to make such a statement.

Using Mr. Hemingway’s standard, I put it out there that no one, NO ONE, could read Beloved and not be changed somehow.

I don’t know who could read this book and not have the scenes become part of their consciousness.

Seemingly a life changing book.

But the book was written back in 1988 and life goes on.

The discussion in Wikipedia states: To heal and humanize, one must constitute it in a language, reorganize the painful events, and retell the painful memories.

Who among us does not have their own yesterdays.

Yesterdays, when examined or remembered, are filled just as much with all the events and emotions and trials as Ms. Morrison chronicles in Beloved.

Wikipedia also states: Morrison may be emphasizing that heroism is defined not by supernatural powers or acts of unparalleled valor, but by the courageous intent to overcome the assertive preconceptions of society in order to ensure the greater good and positively influence on others in the process.

The courageous intent to overcome the assertive preconceptions of society in order to ensure the greater good.

We, all of us, are hero’s, as well deal with our own stories.

The next passage in the book is:

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name.

Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?

Although she has claim, she is not claimed.

Who is she?

She is all of us.

As Ms. Morrison writes, maybe It was not a story to pass on.

2.2.2022 – imaginative

imaginative
hilarious ludicrous
daft ridiculous

Sometime somewhere I read that if you like eating, you like reading about food.

Some of my favorite passages in my reading involved the planning, cooking and eating of fabulous dinners.

Small wonder that Jim Harrison, the author of A Really Big Lunch is one of my favorite writers.

Through Mr. Harrison I also read John Thorne’s wonderful essays on eating and cooking.

But it is the scenes in books not about cooking that talking about cooking that I look for.

CS Forester’s food scenes in his Hornblower Series or even the snatched meals on the bridge that Mr. Forester described in “The Good Shephard.”

The Whale Steak scene in Mr. Melville’s Moby Dick.

The King-eats-with-the-poor-people scene in Mr. Twain’s Connecticut Yankee.

The diner scene in Mr. Thurber’s A Couple of Hamburgers.

With this in mind I clicked on the article, Top 10 cooks in fiction.

The article was in a British Newspaper so I guess I should not be surprised that I wasn’t familiar with any of the books.

The description of the last book listed caught me eye.

The writer writes about the book, Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson, that “The plot is fast-paced but daft, the characters ludicrous but hilarious, and the recipes imaginative but ridiculous.”

For me, any book that can be described with all those wonderful words in one sentence is worth a look-see.

I got my copy this morning out of archive.org so I will add an update soon.

I offer the first paragraph as a window.

If you will insist on arriving at Pisa airport in the summer you will probably have to fight your way out of the terminal building past incoming sun-reddened Brits, snappish with clinking luggage. They are twenty minutes late for their Ryanair cheapo return to Stansted (“I said carry your sister’s bloody bag, Crispin, not drag it. If we miss this flight your life won’t be worth living… “). Ignoring them and once safely outside, you can retrieve your car in leisurely fashion from the long-term park and hit the northbound motorway following the “Genova” signs. Within a mere twenty minutes you are off again at the Viareggio exit. Don’t panic: you are not destined for the beach which stretches its tottering crop of sun umbrel¬ las like poison-hued mushrooms for miles of unexciting coast¬ line. No. You are heading safely inland through the little town of Camaiore.

So promise I think.

1.29.2022 – vivid picture to

vivid picture to
the imagination and was
worth thinking about

According to what I read and watch, a BOMB CYCLONE is heading for the East Coast of the United States.

Sounds awful.

Whenever bad weather is predicted I think of two things.

The first is that I am glad to be out of it.

That simple sentence, for me, has two meanings.

Living in the Low Country of South Carolina and yet to experience a hurricane, the weather here for the most part is what you might call salubrious (a wonderful word and I put it to you that if you can work it into your conversation today you will feel better) or favorable to or promoting health or well-being.

The proximity to an ocean that won’t go below 50 degrees helps keep most of any weather away that might include the word, “freezing.”

For the most part its warm or at least warmer here than where I grew in West Michigan.

Somewhere in my mind is a passage in a book of all old rich man, sitting in the kitchen of his mansion saying something like, “182 rooms and all I want is the warmest one.”

The other meaning to “glad to be out of it” for me, is that for 20 years I was in the news business and in the news business there is no business like the bad weather business.

After I was on the job about 6 months, creating and managing a website for a local TV station, I got a call that I needed to come up with a way to a list any school closings online.

This list also needed to be able to be updated by the schools themselves.

And if I could somehow figure out how to send out an email with the list of school closings to anyone who wanted it, that would be even better.

“When?”, was my response.

“Tomorrow”, was the answer.

Understand that just a little more than 20 years ago, none of this information was online.

There was no online.

The most fun of my job and creating an online news environment was that I never would say that something couldn’t be done because nothing HAD been done and we did not know what couldn’t be done so we did everything.

And somehow the next morning we had school closings online.

More recently I was involved with the online video streaming of news.

As EB White wrote on the News and weather, “radio [News] people, Nature is an oddity tinged with malevolence and worthy of note only in her more violent moments. The radio [News] either lets Nature alone or gives her the full treatment.

The full news treatment for News Online involved me a lot.

Weekends, after hours, all hours, I was up and online and making sure that the weather got the full treatment.

Now, I am glad to be out of it.

The other thing I think about is an essay, again by EB White.

In fact, it is the essay where that the earlier quote about Nature being an oddity tinged with malevolence comes from.

It is an essay of Mr. White’s that appeared in The New Yorker magazine on September 25, 1954 and is included in the book, The Essays of E.B. White, that you can read online at archive.org.

The title of the essay is, “The Eye of Edna” and it tells the story of Mr. White following Hurricane Edna as it came up the Atlantic Coast.

In 1954, hour by hour radio coverage of a hurricane was something new for Mr. White and the world at large.

I cannot read this essay without comparing the news coverage of 1954 with the news coverage of 2022.

What I think when I make such a comparison is that there is nothing new to the news here.

Mr. White tells how a reporter on the scene of the storm was asked about road conditions.

The hurricane rains and ocean storm surges had been predicted to wipe out local roads.

“They were wet” reported the reporter, who, according to Mr. White, “seemed to be in a sulk.”

In the essay, Mr. White recounts his own efforts to prepare his home for the coming storm.

In the essay, there is this sentence, “The croquet set was brought in. (I was extremely skeptical about the chance of croquet balls coming in through the window, but it presented a vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about.).

The oft-quoted-by-me writer Alain de Botton, used the phrase, I began word-painting.

Starting with the thought a hurricane and wind tossed trees and such.

Then add a croquet set.

Throw in windows, car windshields and maybe someone’s forehead.

Then thinking about how to paint scene this with words, I don’t think anyone could do better than “I was extremely skeptical about the chance of croquet balls coming in through the window, but it presented a vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about.”

29 words and I can see it all in my mind’s eye.

I can see it in my mind and it never happened.

A vivid picture to the imagination.

Something worth thinking about.

1.28.2022 – meijer or meijers

meijer or meijers
canada suburb of detroit
vernors medicine

I recently came across a list of things that all people of Detroit know.

And by Detroit, I mean, anyone from Michigan.

One was that Meijer’s was better than Walmart.

Another was the Meijer’s was called Meijer’s because you add S’s to make every name possive.

You didn’t work for Ford.

You worked for Ford’s.

Therefore Meijer’s WAS Meijer’s not Meijer.

For us in West Michigan, it was Meijer’s because it was Fred’s store.

Another was your preference of Ford’s, GM or Chrysler’s depended on wear your grandpa worked.

People in Detroit know that Canada is not a country, it is a suburb of Detroit and to get to Canada from Detroit, you have to go south.

And if you are from Detroit, you know Vernor’s is medicine.

Dutch Alka Seltzer we called it.

It is the drink you got when you had the stomach flu or an upset tummy.

There was a famous commercial for Vernor’s and the entire commercial was of a man typing and thinking as he typed.

The man was Detroit novelist Elmore Leonard.

As he typed he thought out loud.

“They looked at each other.

The man opened a can and poured.

They drank.

It tasted like ….”

The writer paused.

And paused some more.

He could not come up with the words he needed to describe the taster the drink.

He gets a can of Vernor’s and opened and poured it into a glass.

He tastes the drink.

He looks back at the typewriter now prepared to describe it.

“It tasted like Vernor’s,” he wrote.

There are no other words.

As they commercial ends, the voice over says, “It what we drink around here.”