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"The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. Looking back on a sojourn in the African highlands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigor to it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water... Up in this high air, you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be."
Waking up Thursday morning about 4:30, the sky just getting light, the air was the coolest it gets all night in the high desert and there was the smell of dry grass with the dew on it coming from the foothills. And I breathed the grass smell and rolled over (no, not even I can think of long literary passages at 4:30 in the morning). But later I thought of this perfect and heartbreaking passage from Out of Africa. (Notice the change of tense in the third sentence--writing this years after leaving Africa, she gets so caught up in her description she forgets it's past.)
I'd forgotten how much I love this book (sorry, Dad, I think I took your copy). The first seven pages are, I think, the most brilliant beginning of any book, ever. Well, maybe Anna Karenina ties in brilliance. But that's pretty brilliant.
Old Pliny Dance-for-Ham. (See Tuesday's post, if you're confused.)And here's some literature for all those who don't find hobo names as hilarious as I do. It's summer, as you may have noticed, and that means Big City Soup is now serving gazpacho, which gets a passage in Hemingway's The Garden of Eden:It came in a large bowl with ice floatingwith the slices of crisp cucumber, tomato, garlic bread, green and red peppers, and the coarsely peppered liquid that tasted lightly of oil and vinegar.'It's a salad soup,' Catherine said. 'It's delicious.''Es gazpacho,' the waiter said.
#131: Sherlock-Holmes-Hat Carl III
#217: Joachim Bat-in-Hair
#277: Pally McAffable, Everybody's Friend
(I know, it's not much. You expect more from me. I'll see what I can do.)
1. The poem from yesterday is called "Tahoe in August."
2. Here's a key to symbols used by hobos to communicate with each other.
3. The origin of the word "hobo" comes from "hoe boy," which stems from the post-Civil War South, when farm boys would go out with their hoes in search of farm work.
4. The bundle-at-the-end-of-a-stick-thing hobos carry over their shoulder is called a "bindlestick." I don't know the orign of that term.
5. Have you ever wanted a hobo name? Here's a list of 700 hobo names. Some have been illustrated. They come from a book. It's a long story. (My top hobo name picks for today: #153, Slo-Mo Deuteronomy; #614, Salad-Fork Ron; and #335, Crispy-Whiskery.)
HOURS of fun to be had on this blog, folks...
I might try a summer theme this week, if I can plan ahead enough to get my literature in order. I was walking to the car this morning and it was already warm, and I thought of more Robert Hass. These are the first two lines of a poem I can't remember the title of, but will find and report tomorrow:
"What summer promises is simply happines:
heat early in the morning, jays raucous in the pines..."
Part II of an extremely occasional series brings us this article from today's Salt Lake Tribune: "Jacob's bad luck - is it...Satan?".
("Now, Karen, having the Prince of Darkness sabotage your political campaign is NO LAUGHING MATTER." Gosh.)
My roommate Todd has started living with me again, although he leaves for vacation tomorrow morning and I am NOT HAPPY about that. (Are you reading this, Todd?)
I was cleaning out a filing cabinet this week and found a stash of notes we'd left each other over the last three years. Profundities like, "Just because you were disappointed doesn't mean you were wrong" are followed by, "Sorry I left the dishes again."
But it was very comforting to find that. For some reason, it made me think of this Robert Hass poem. (That's the inspiration for the image today.) So read, be comforted, and do the dishes for your roommate.
Found this link to barbecues on the Coudal Partners site, one of which made Michelle remark, "Nothing says a good night's sleep like drying meat," which then reminded me of a Michelle quote from a while back: "I once ate forty to fifty pieces of deer jerky in one sitting."
Meat!
Tomorrow is the summer solstice, at 9:36 a.m. In honor of that, don your robes, pick a chant, and go somewhere tonight to watch the sun set. If you're a local druid, I suggest our own take on Stonehenge, the Spiral Jetty. (Okay, it has nothing in common with Stonhenge except rocks. But it's all we have.)
Maybe TWO.
(It's in two parts.)
Part I:
Go outside. Especially if it's a lovely evening and your apartment is empty because your roommate is STILL GONE, making you want to get a dog which would at least give you something to talk to besides yourself. (ARE YOU READING THIS, TODD? I'M SERIOUS. I'D NAME HIM BUDDY. WE COULD HIKE TOGETHER.) I recommend parts of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail: Up above City Creek, as mentioned yesterday, or around Red Butte, where I went last night. (I somehow got off the trail and ended up at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Lots of patios for a hospital.)
Part II:
If you're hiking in the grassy foothills--or really, if you're just about anywhere--heed the advice of today's picture.
The trailhead from Sunday's little hike is at 18th Ave. and Hilltop Road. I know, because I went back yesterday evening. (Because if the day was long and you haven't seen your roommate in almost a week and you're full of nameless anxiety, you should not stay in your apartment and shop online.) I've always loved seeing the light on the foothills here; I'm glad it finally dawned on me I'd probably like being in those foothills in the evening light, too.Almost as good as foothills for cheering you up: Jim Coudal's recipe for the perfect martini. I think I'll try it tonight.
It's a thinly-disguised fact that I owe most of what I know to the J. Peterman catalog: If I read about it there, I would usually go and find out more--from British colonialism, Lawrence of Arabia, or Elsa Maxwell to Tolstoy.And now, 12 years after my first historic Peterman, I've discovered M.F.K. Fisher, who was mentioned in a Spring/Summer issue probably around 1996. (Seriously. There was an apron dress you could buy, in pink or blue.) I picked up The Gastronomical Me, and this is what won me over:
Now...the three of us are in some ways even more than twenty-five years older than we were then. And still the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream we ate together that August night live in our hearts' palates, succulent, secret, delicious.
"Hearts' palates." Perfect.
Why, yes I did.
All the linden trees are in bloom in the neighborhood, which of course made me think of Proust having linden blossom tea and a madeleine, thus summoning his childhood memories of such and inspiring all twelve volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. (No, I've onloy read the first one.)
So I made madeleines. Hooray, we have an Office Snack of The Day again!
Yessterday evening I met up with an old friend and her friend, and we all went for a hike in the foothills. We took a "shortcut" to the trailhead (on 18th Avenue and...um...Liberty Road?) and then walked up, and around, and finally down into City Creek and back home to 10th Avenue on the pavement. But the grass was still green on the foothills, there was wild rhubarb by the stream, the evening light was high and clear and yellow--and we got to talk about Robert Hass's poems. So a good evening.
Here's a quote I found from The Enormous and Ongoing Inspirational Quote Project that seemed to relate:
Why should all the major religions of the modern world include a crucial encounter with wilderness—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed in the desert mountains, Siddhartha in the jungle? And why should the predominant modern view of the origin and development of life have arisen from the five-year wilderness voyage of a Victorian amateur naturalist named Charles Darwin? ...Placing Darwin in the tradition of Moses and Jesus may seem heresy from both the Judeo-Christian and scientific viewpoints, but I think the roles played by the three figures have been similar. They wrenched their respective cultures out of a complacency that amounted to self-worship and thrust them in new directions that (if not always entirely beneficial) enlarged the human perspective. Moses forced his society to accept a unifying law; Jesus forced his to accept the unity of all humanity; Darwin forced his to accept the unity of all life. I doubt whether any of the three would have been able to influence his society if he had not been fortified by a season in the wilderness.
David Rains Wallace (b. 1945), U.S. naturalist, essayist. “Tracks in the Wilderness,” The Klamath Knot, Sierra (1983).
Hey, happy Friday, everyone.Patience. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
Promiscuity: optimism, free enterprise, mobility—the American Dream.
Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
The quotations I've been looking through to include on the inspirational site we're building range from dreadful ("Hem your blessings with gratitude so they don't uravel") to just plain unsuitable:
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Self-respect—The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956)
(The image is from Despair, Inc. Brilliant.)
The quote: Part of the ongoing project for an inspirational website. Good times, looking at inspirational quote sources.
The fish taco: lately, the most delicious thing I can think of to eat. (Especially this one, the Del Taco fish taco, $1.69.) And the blog needed some pictures.Coming tomorrow and Friday: UNinspirational Quotations!
Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.
Author: The Buddha
Coudal Partners is an agency in Chicago with a witty, articulate web site with all sorts of artsy stuff--short films, stories, writing contests. The latest one we've been watching is the Booking Bands contest (now, unfortunately over, but still fun to think of) which involves combining a book with a band name, i.e. Horton Hears a Hoobastank or Megadeath of a Salesman. Look for an entry by yours truly, and others by the boss here, who won a prize. Hours of fun.
I haven't read this quote's source, but I do like it:
... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.- M.F.K. Fisher
Potential Band Name Found in Everyday Conversation: Heated Pita.
Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.
–Molière
Here are shots from the hotel--the Odeon Theater was just to the south. And there were some good clouds on day three.
