A Quote From Todd + A Robert Hass Poem

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.

Wednesday Meat Theme

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!

Druids, Pay Attention

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.)

It's Monday. We Need a Kitten Picture.

Maybe TWO.

Friday Advice

(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.

Foothills

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.

The Delights of M.F.K. Fisher

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.

"Oh my god, she cooked something?"

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!

Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Darwin...and me!

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).

Un-Inspirational, Part II

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)

Un-Inspirational, Part I

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.)

An Inspirational Quote. And a Fish Taco

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

Hey, We're Kinda Famous

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.

Paris One Last Time, and a Band Name

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.

Thought for Friday

Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.
–Molière

The Last of Paris

Here are shots from the hotel--the Odeon Theater was just to the south. And there were some good clouds on day three.

Attractions

Monet's garden (yes, that one) and "The Bronze Age" in the Rodin Museum.

(Literature will be making a comeback soon, I promise.)

Pond Maintenance at Versailles

Because you can't have any pond scum clogging up your Louis XIV fountains. I wonder who has to wheel the palm trees in for the winter.

It's Friday.

The Friday before Memorial Day. It's supposed to be 88 degrees. Quit reading this (expecting Paris pictures? I'll get some more) and go outside.

People Are Dying to Get in Here!

HA! (That was for you, Dad.)


These were all taken in the Pere Lachaise cemetary. The middle photo is of the statue that's on Oscar Wilde's tomb; the top is, well, Rossini's grave (imagine that); and the bottom is photographic evidence of a Focus among all the mossy tombs and marble monuments. Because you have to be able to get around.

Yes, I Was Really There

This is me, and that's the Eiffel Tower. Yes, that Eiffel Tower.

Being Parisian

This is in the Luxembourg Gardens, on the only day the sun shone for more than an hour at a time. We sat in green chairs, just like these Parisians. It was very nice. As I quoted Willa saying two weeks ago, "Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly..."

There Is Never Any End to Paris

Literally.

We walked and walked, stopped for wine and food, walked again, stopped for beauty products, walked some more...I got back on Saturday toned and smelling of French cosmetics.

It was great. (Pictures forthcoming this week, I promise.)

Finally, Literature

Courtesy of our buddy Hemingway, here's another Paris quote. (I know I'm always promising and not delivering, but this comes as part of a longer passage at the end of A Moveable Feast which I will indeed quote here someday. If I come back.)

There is never any end to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other


(The image is of the hotel where Papa Hemingway would write, when he lived in Paris. He would walk over from his flat in the mornings. The French sign says something along the lines of, 'Paul Verlaine died in this building January 8, 1896. Born March 30, 1844.' Vive the internet!)

This Is All About Paris

Sadly, it just isn't about literature. (Hey, someone has been deciding what to wear to France. And learning how to work her camera. And trying to say, "No, you can't buy my mother a drink" in French. It's been busy.)

This Isn't About Paris

But it is about birds. (I forgot the book I wanted to use today, so bear with me. They could be Parisian birds.) I just found this. Good old Emily Dickinson.

A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass—

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad—
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought—
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home—

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

It's Paris Week!

Actually, it won't be a full week, as I leave Friday to see what everyone's talking about. If the blog doesn't resume the week of the 22nd, we can all safely assume I decided to stay and start my novel. Here's what Willa Cather (of all people!) has to say about it:

"Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness."

Some History

Because it is, of course, el Cinco de Mayo and I have access to the all-encompassing internet, here's some history on today's holiday and on pinatas. (Hey, I didn't know about either of them. It's an educational blog today.)

Another Salinger Cop-Out

Yes, it's been busy today, so we can all be glad I keep a record of these passages as I find them. (And yes, that is a James Thurber drawing of a dog. That's a particularly brilliant detail our old buddy Salinger adds.)

This is from "A Young Girl in 1941 With No Wast At All," Salinger's short story originally published in The New Yorker:

She was a beautifully, a perfectly, gray-haired woman in a long sleeved evening gown with Thurber dogs in the pattern. She was wearing a pear-shaped diamond ring and a diamond bracelet. Just on sight no one very sensible would have laid bets on her background. She might, years ago, have walked very erectly across a Broadway stage, with an ostrich fan, singing A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody, or something similarly ostrich fan-ish. She might have been an ambassador’s daughter or a fireman’s daughter. She might have been her husband’s secretary for years. As only second-class beauty can be identified, there was no way of telling.

I Heart Literature

(Sorry. I had to make that pun.)

I ran across a quote from the Upanishads yesterday which echoed one I found last Chirstmas from Makarios the Great, who was apparently an Egyptian monk. And the drawing's by Leonardo. Pretty far-ranging blog, I'd say.


The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not. --The Upanishads


The heart itself is only a small vessel,
yet dragons are there, and lions,
there are poisonous beasts,
and all the treasures of evil,
there are rough and uneven roads,
there are precipices;
but there too is God and the angels,
life is there, and the Kingdom,
there too is light, and there the apostles
and heavenly cities,
and treasures of grace.
All things lie within that little space.
--Makarios the Great

Guess What I've Been Reading?

More Mark Strand, of course. This is from Dark Harbor, and is notable not only for a non-silly use of "alas" in a modern poem, but also the inspired choice of "compassionate" to describe the wind.

"Is it you or the long, compassionate wind
that whispers in my ear, 'Alas, alas'?"

(The whole section is worth posting. Maybe tomorrow.)

Why I Love It Here, Part I

Three words: Rocky Mountain Raceways. They are host to events such as the "Discount Tire Midnight Drag," the "Jet Car Spring Nationals," "Funny Car Fever," and somthing called "Fuel and Fire," which I can only imagine. Buy tickets here. Go, have a drink, watch jet cars, see the light on the mountains, and be happy where you are.

Mark Strand Will Save Us

That feeling of being privy to a new and great truth just because you were lucky enough to pick up a particular book is a source of endless delight and amazement, yes, but in particular times and with certain literature (okay, poetry) it can almost be a source of blessedness, of certainty there is an order for good in the universe. I have to think, "Someone who could put this feeling into words exits in the universe, was lucky enough to have the words ready for the feeling, was lucky enough to be able to share these words, and I was lucky enough to discover them when I didn't know I needed them."

Or something along those lines. This is actually carved above the water feature that's in the south end of the Gallivan Center. I found it in college and, indeed, thought I was lucky.

Visions of the end may secretly seduce
our thoughts like water sinking
into water, air drifting into air;
clouds may form, when least expected,
darkening the glass of self,
canceling resemblances to what we are.
Even here, while summer sunlight
falling through the golden
folds of afternoon
brightens up the air, we mark
our progress by how much
we leave behind. And yet,
this vanishing is burnished
by a slow, melodious light,
as if our passage here
were beautiful because
no turning back is possible.
It is our knowledge of the end
that speaks for us, that has us weave,
as slowly as we can, an elegy
to all our walks. It is our way
of bending to the world's will
and giving thanks.

Cut and Color

So I made a hair appointment Saturday, which reminded me of this (fairly long) passage from The Long Goodbye. "Kingpin racketeers"--long live Raymond Chandler.

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home...

There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable kind. She is very languid and very shadowy and speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal...

And lastly there is the gorgeous showpiece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

Band Stuff

Two more Potential Band Names Found in Everyday Conversation:
1. Crawl On Down The Wall
(From talking about "those gummy spiders you throw at the wall and they stick until they start to crawl on down.")
2. Co-dependent Consumptive
(From when I'd had a sneezing attack and then put on powder prior to going out. I asked my roommate--since the powder was a little pale and my eyes were red and puffy--"Do I look consumptive?" And hilarity ensued, and we ended up deciding I should write a personal ad that starts out "co-dependent consumptive seeks same..." and see how many dates I got then.)

Other Band Stuff:
Neko Case is playing Suede in Park City on June 17th.

Even More Band Stuff:
If you're looking for the archetypal bar experience, you can go to The Republican on Sunday nights and listen to the house band. And drink lots of beer.

There Goes Chris

Another from Chris:
"It wasn’t just Chinatown, it was more like Chinacity, and it was full of Chinese people.”

Our Chris is an invited blogger for the AdTech conference in San Francisco, which means he gets to attend all the parties and write blog entries. (A shame they don't have these conferences for literature, really.)
He'll start posting tomorrow. Click on the blue BLOG navigation at the bottom left of this page:
www.ad-tech.com

The Lady in the Taco

In the ever-evolving search for good names for things, we're moving from Potential Band Names Found In Everyday Conversation to Potential Titles of Award-Winning First Novels Found in Everyday Conversation (PTOAWFNFIEC, for short). We were telling Shea about Rio Grande (he'd never eaten there) and he asked, "They have a lady in a taco there, right?" Yes, they do.

I Just Found Out I Have Tomorrow Off

(I'm getting these here. Visit. Be happy.)

This Is Why I Love Literature

There's something so satisfying about hearing something and immediately recognizing its truth and beauty, even if it's something you've never thought of before. I picked up The Hours again last night, and found this:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book... What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Alternate Post of the Day:

Finding Profound Meaning in Popular Song Lyrics

Profundity is actully pretty common in songs, I firmly believe. (Think of Bob Dylan. Enough said.) I'm discovering how much I love Neko Case, who can maybe be described as Patsy Cline channeling Tori Amos, with a killer steel guitar player. Not only can she belt, she writes her own songs. Check them out. This is from "I Wish I Was the Moon," on Blacklisted.

"How will you know if you've found me at last?
'Cause I'll be the one with my heart in my lap"

Band Names

And today, here's a list of Potential Band Names Found in Everyday Conversation:

Orcas in Antarctica
Hotdog Water
Heroin Dog
Former Penal Colony
Endless Meat Parade
Gone City
Horse Hooves and Goat Beans

(Oh yeah, you can check out The Website That Nearly Killed Us here: www.mytimeforce.com)

There Will Be New Material Tomorrow, I Promise

Until then, there's Salinger.
And a little problem with a "fatal error" message with Dreamweaver, which means creativity has to wait while a site is recovered from screen shots and old files. The wacky agency life, indeed.

From the good old "Hapworth 16, 1924":

He has a mother, however, a young divorcee with an exquisite, swanky face slightly ravaged by vanity and self-love and a few silly disappointments in life, though not silly to her, we may be sure.

What a Post-It Note On My Desk Says Right Now:

"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T FORGET THE JELLO SHOTS"


(Oh, the wacky agency life...)

Salinger, Part III

"I find it magnificent how beautiful loose ends find each other in the world if one only waits with decent patience, resilience, and quite blind strength."

Let's hope this is proved correct. We have a huge site that has to go up Monday morning, and it's still being built. I hope our blind strength will be enough. It's a little sleep-deprived at this point.

Salinger, Part II

From the same story as yesterday:

While the food itself is not atrocious, it is cooked without a morsel of affection or inspiration, each string bean and simple carrot arriving on the camper's plate quite stripped if its tiny vegetal soul...A nameless inertia hangs over these two [the cooks], alternating with fits of unreasonable wrath, stripping them of any will or desire to prepare creditable, affectionate food or even to keep the bent silverware on the tables spotless and clean as a whistle. The sight of the forks alone often whips Buddy into a raw fury. He is working on this tendency, but a revolting fork is a revolting fork.

Word, Salinger

I have to admit that last week I had a moment of doubt and thought, "Is Salinger still alive?" He is, and I discovered lots of his uncollected stories have been put online. While this is not expressly against his wishes (they were published once, after all), it's probably entering the murky waters of copyright infringement. But in the spirit of the Internet, here's a link to the story "Hapworth 16, 1924," written by a precocious 7-year-old Seymour Glass. (It's a long story, so be warned.) It had such gems as this in it:

Few of these magnificent, healthy, sometimes remarkably handsome boys will mature. The majority, I will give you my heartbreaking opinion, will merely senesce. Is that a picture to tolerate in one's heart? On the contrary, it is a picture to rip the heart to pieces.

That's just so satisfying to hear.

Literature: It's Everywhere

Take, for instance, this quote from Chris yesterday:
"This coffee is so strong, that if you think 'hot dog' and take a sip, it tastes like hot dogs."

Found It

The "weeds" bit is in the first section, but the whole thing is worth reading--all about the move from chaos to order. Water's big, too, going from mud and bog, to holding life, to supporting a boat with a rower, to the final image of water in a vase "still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower." Fabulous. I think of this a lot in spring; the last part in summer, too, going outside in the mornings with "To have the whole air!" in my head.

The Shape of the Fire

"...weeds, weeds, how I love you!"

There's some Roethke I thought of over the weekend (I'll try to remember the book tomorrow so I can give some context). Sunday was the first really warm day, and I smelled weeds everywhere--the little, purple-flowered, sharp-smelling (stinky, according to my brother) weeds that grow in sidewalk corners and parking lots. (Does anyone know what they're called, by the way? I can't find a picture because I don't know the name.) It was a good spring smell.

Sorry, No Literature. Nobody Here But Us Ponies.

I had a literary passage about painting, of all things, from Franny & Zooey, and was going to quote it extensively today, but forgot the book. It will probably still be relevant Monday, as the painting is going slower than I thought it would. (Although painting the ceiling twice might have something to do with it. On the up side, I do know how to use a paint roller now.) Anyway, continuing the second theme of the week, here are somre more horses. The littlest one is a palomino paint! I would call him Barney!

Dappled Things

So all this talk of paint horses, and spotted animals (did we all like the alpaca's ear pom-poms?), coupled with constantly wiping ups drips of latex paint, made me think of the Gerard Manley Hopkins (great name) sonnet on spotted things.
GLORY be to God for dappled things-- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough; 5 And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10 Praise him.

Things That Resemble a Paint:

Paint

This is a lovely picture of a very fine paint horse. I've always liked paint horses, and "paint" may just become the topic of the week, because someone may be painting her room this week and may be learning about textured ceilings and paint rollers. Maybe.

But we can always remember yesterday's post and think of the finished result (if someone is actually painting, after all) and say, maybe while rolling a ceiling, "Paint is a guppy."

(But not this paint horse. He would be called Rob.)

The Past Is A Guppy

Today's literary phrase (in the title, in case you're confused) is courtesy of my roommate, during a discussion on perspective. We were talking about how intensely sad (or joyful) something can be at the time, but as time passes, the intensity fades, until it's almost unbelieveable you ever felt that way.

My roommate used the analogy of a child being sad about the death of his pet fish: He's heartbroken at the time, but remembering the experience as an adult doesn't carry the same weight. It may still be a sad memory, but it's not a tragedy.

At this point in the conversation my rommate pauses, and I, wanting to sum up, volunteer, "So the past is a guppy?" Which effectively ends all deep thoughts in the conversation but was fun to say.