AGH!!

Falstaff, Henry IV Part I, fooling no one: An I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I am a peppercorn, a brewer’s horse. The inside of a church! Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me.

I’m on Twitter at @erasing. I’ve been on it since January 2009. Been tweeting in boring old plain English since 2010. But during the entirety of 2009, I tweeted only in iambic pentameter.

Recently I went back and compiled all those iambic pentameter tweets into what I’m calling an accidental long poem: “Good Morning Winter, Walking Down the Street”.

If you don’t want to read that whole thing, here is the abridged version:

G.M.W.W.D.T.S.

• Jan

  Good morning winter, walking down the street.
  Returning home my face is frozen off.
• Feb

  I’m looking Blu-ray, feeling VHS.
• Mar

  Sadistic cryptic crosswords fill the hours.
• Apr

  Tonight for dinner: Cuckoo-clock confit,
  filet of Roomba grilled on planks of Nerf,
  and blog pilaf with spicy fuck-you slaw.
• May

  We read till late, then sleep in signatures.
• Jun

  At night machines emerge to clean our streets.
  They chug & rumble by with sweepers down,
  like Sisyphuses driving Sherman tanks.
• Jul

  This summer has been edited for length.
• Aug

  The choppy lake’s profuse with creepy fish.
  Our cozy lodge is loud with crabby tots.
• Sep

  Our furniture persists in roaming free.
  The bookshelves wander in & out of rooms,
  the desks & tables pace the floors till dawn.
• Oct

  My English hath evaporated, bad.
• Nov

  We undepressed ourselves on local draughts,
  and chowders made from creatures of the deep,
  and hearty plates of Indie Rock Poisson.
• Dec

  My vodka tonic’s singing Auld Lang Syne.

Saturday afternoon: Pints of esoteric suds to distract us from our mobile devices and pads of paper.

Friday night: Vaguely splenetic early-spring snow-broth.

Robert Lowell, in a 1957 letter to Elizabeth Bishop, describing a boating trip in Maine with some literary friends: “It was rich in undramatic mishaps.”

From Mark Strand’s new book of prose poems, Almost Invisible, “A Letter from Tegucigalpa”:

Dear Henrietta, since you were kind enough to ask why I no longer write, I shall do my best to answer you. In the old days, my thoughts like tiny sparks would flare up in the almost dark of consciousness and I would transcribe them, and page after page shone with a light that I called my own. I would sit at my desk amazed by what had just happened. And even as I watched the lights fade and my thoughts become small, meaningless memorials in the afterglow of so much promise, I was still amazed. And when they disappeared, as they inevitably did, I was ready to begin again, ready to sit in the dark for hours and wait for even a single spark, though I knew it would shed almost no light at all. What I had not realized then, but now know only too well, is that sparks carry within them the wish to be relieved of the burden of brightness. And that is why I no longer write, and why the dark is my freedom and my happiness.

It can’t be that great if their branding commits the graphic design sin of stretching
and compressing a single typeface rather than using extended and condensed widths.

Above: Bad Wolf antidote. Photographed today at downtown Hamilton’s Jackson Square shopping mall during a Saturday visit to the Farmer’s Market.

Simon has alerted me to the likelihood that that Bad Wolf graffiti I photographed outside Jackson Square last weekend may be a tribute to Doctor Who, in which the phrase Bad Wolf has had a recurring significance, even to the point of appearing in graffiti form on the show. I confess I have never watched Doctor Who, so the reference rocketed at spectacular altitude over my head if indeed that’s what it is. I’d just thought the graffiti tag was a run-of-the-mill instance of weird and gnomic street art, and posted the photo as an obscurely amusing follow-up to posts involving pigs and weather that threatens to blow our house down.

But the Doctor Who explanation seems plausible to me. I’ve seen three of these Bad Wolf tags in the same general area of downtown Hamilton, all of them apparently done very recently. Did this spraycan artist only just discover the first Doctor Who series? The show’s Bad Wolf bullshit is like seven years old if I’m reading Wikipedia right. I myself am disinclined to get into Doctor Who for a petty reason: the Tenth Doctor‘s leading role in an howlingly unbearable butchering of Hamlet. Give me a break, I was brainwashed at an impressionable age by a Bardolatrous English department. Also I apologize for employing the adverb howlingly in a passage with wolf content.

Above: Neon windowpig, front and back, Memphis Fire Barbeque Company, Winona, Ontario.
Below: Wendy Cope, “Traditional Prize County Pigs”, on the Dorset Gold Tip, an extinct breed:

A twenty-four-hour wind storm hits us on Friday evening. I am peeling and de-veining white shrimp and listening to music and it gradually dawns that the weather noise outside has grown noticeable over the recordings. Great muscular gusts swell up every several seconds and whoosh and hammer against the windows with unfamiliar violence. The window frames creak, rattle, groan, and every so often emit an alarming and unlocatable tenor sax–like squeal as the wind finds its way into some kind of structural sweet spot. I hear short firecracker bursts of raindrops patter at high speed against the panes in the bedroom and the living room. I see dim silhouettes of five-story trees thrashing in the dark. Laura gets home from work after having walked in the weather and asserts shruggingly that it’s not so bad out there. The internet tells me of local wind-related mayhem, downed power lines, rising Great Lake levels, spazzed-out airport wind socks reporting numbers in excess of highway speed limits, tree limbs falling into roads and electric restaurant signs biting the dust. We spend a few hours cooking and dining and watching movies and the wind noise persists the whole time. It does not abate. It is still roaring to itself and the vacant streets in a Pacinoesque fury well after midnight. Neither of us is entirely awake as we listen to this late-night weather bludgeoning the building. In the dark I suggest to Laura that the wind storm’s sounds are soothing, like a pounding ocean surf, the windows’ creaks making the house seem like a ship at sea. Laura points out that waves crashing on a shore or against a ship’s hull have a regular, mesmerizing rhythm, whereas the wind’s gusts are erratic and so the lulling effect never really kicks in. Somehow we do sleep. In the morning the wind is still up. The gusts whistle and thwack, the panes shudder, and the trees flail with abandon as we eat breakfast, drink coffee, read. Banks of immense clouds sail overhead at a disorienting and scale-obliterating clip, making the sunlight in the house flash on and off like a bad basement light for much of the midmorning and afternoon. By sunset the wind has slowly eased back down to its usual mutterings and silences. Sometime before that we take a break from wasting our weekend over weather appreciation and pulpy books to slice open and eat a few non-local fruits whose insides’ color schemes and textures are surprising.

“extraneous, appendix-like, the temporal wadded napkin under the calendar year’s wobbly table leg”

Above: Delicious PEI mussels. Tonight for dinner we will be cooking two pounds of them and eating them with big-ass baguettes. The above photo is from last summer — sorry to be photographically disingenuous. Tonight’s mussels, obtained at the Farmer’s Market this afternoon, are still in the fridge, resting up for the big event.

Several days ago I read a 2009 Mark Bittman NYT blog post on the subject of PEI mussels which makes me almost expire with simultaneous laughter and eye-rolling:

I was told, just the other day, that Prince Edward Island mussels were “the best.” They’re not. They’re consistent, they’re the most widely available, they’re not bad, and they’re not outrageously priced. “The best” mussels are the ones you harvest yourself, from a nice dock or outcropping of rocks in a cold tidal inlet. The second best are the ones someone else harvests from a like place, then sells to you. The third best are covered with mud or seaweed or whatever, and are difficult to clean, but are also wild and tasty. After these, the farm-raised ones from P.E.I. are kind of bland.

I like Mark Bittman. I’ve learned a lot from Mark Bittman. I am absolutely a Mark Bittman fan and acolyte. I was a terrible, terrible cook until I bought his How to Cook Everything and started using it as my kitchen instruction manual and culinary desk reference. But everything about that post just irrationally puts me in mind of a bit by Anthony Bourdain from Medium Raw:

I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home — in an aluminum saucepot — and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face.

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift: Charlie Citrine ponders cosmic boredom:

For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing.

And:

The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought.

And:

As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realization, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!