1. Yesterday I went out in the pouring rain to visit the Boston Olive Oil Company with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sairaali and ratatosk. It turns out that I don't like flavored olive oils very much, but flavored vinegars are the best thing. Especially balsamic vinegars made with figs, or honey, or lavender, or pomegranates and quinces. I sent a text message to derspatchel: "I have drunk about a cup of different vinegars. Astringent but fun." I did not take any home for myself, but I got presents for both of my parents and made mental notes about salads. After we got back, Ratatosk fished for Hestia and Autolycus with a cat toy he had made himself from a lath, string, and paper. He had great success. Some beautiful cresting leaps were observed, especially from Autolycus. Saira provided moral support (and extra hands) while I assembled a Medusa-branched lamp with differently colored plastic shades because our previous pole lamp had pretty much burnt out. Our living room is now much brighter than it has been, with occasional confusing shadows. The cat toy rests beside the television and both cats periodically investigate it, batting at the paper in a hinting sort of way. It's just so much more fun with a person at the other end.
2. Three striking poems I just read in the same issue of Poetry:
Solmaz Sharif, "Persian Letters"
Dunya Mikhail, "My Grandmother's Grave"
Danez Smith, "Dinosaurs in the Hood"
I really do not dislike mainstream poetry at all. It just needs to be the right mainstream.
3. Speaking of poets, I hope very much that this ghost in the frame really is Isaac Rosenberg.nineweaving pointed out that the story sounds like the start of a novel: the retired detective, a lifelong reader of poetry, catches a glimpse of a familiar face in a flicker of century-old film and begins to unravel a mystery . . . Probably this is why I have borrowed my mother's older, broken-backed copy of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951), with a 1969 postcard of Richard III still stuck between pages 74 and 75. (Grey-eyed Richard, with the genes for fair hair. If the portrait is accurate, it darkened as he grew out of childhood—so now I imagine him a tow-headed kid, like my husband in thirty-year-old photographs.) But mostly I hope it is true for the poet's sake: to see him alive, even so long after the fact. Rosenberg died on April Fool's Day in 1918. He was twenty-seven. He wrote a never-produced play with Lilith in it. It is not true that film is a better immortality than paintings or poems, but it's not a bad cenotaph.
sairaali and ratatosk. It turns out that I don't like flavored olive oils very much, but flavored vinegars are the best thing. Especially balsamic vinegars made with figs, or honey, or lavender, or pomegranates and quinces. I sent a text message to derspatchel: "I have drunk about a cup of different vinegars. Astringent but fun." I did not take any home for myself, but I got presents for both of my parents and made mental notes about salads. After we got back, Ratatosk fished for Hestia and Autolycus with a cat toy he had made himself from a lath, string, and paper. He had great success. Some beautiful cresting leaps were observed, especially from Autolycus. Saira provided moral support (and extra hands) while I assembled a Medusa-branched lamp with differently colored plastic shades because our previous pole lamp had pretty much burnt out. Our living room is now much brighter than it has been, with occasional confusing shadows. The cat toy rests beside the television and both cats periodically investigate it, batting at the paper in a hinting sort of way. It's just so much more fun with a person at the other end.2. Three striking poems I just read in the same issue of Poetry:
Solmaz Sharif, "Persian Letters"
Dunya Mikhail, "My Grandmother's Grave"
Danez Smith, "Dinosaurs in the Hood"
I really do not dislike mainstream poetry at all. It just needs to be the right mainstream.
3. Speaking of poets, I hope very much that this ghost in the frame really is Isaac Rosenberg.
nineweaving pointed out that the story sounds like the start of a novel: the retired detective, a lifelong reader of poetry, catches a glimpse of a familiar face in a flicker of century-old film and begins to unravel a mystery . . . Probably this is why I have borrowed my mother's older, broken-backed copy of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951), with a 1969 postcard of Richard III still stuck between pages 74 and 75. (Grey-eyed Richard, with the genes for fair hair. If the portrait is accurate, it darkened as he grew out of childhood—so now I imagine him a tow-headed kid, like my husband in thirty-year-old photographs.) But mostly I hope it is true for the poet's sake: to see him alive, even so long after the fact. Rosenberg died on April Fool's Day in 1918. He was twenty-seven. He wrote a never-produced play with Lilith in it. It is not true that film is a better immortality than paintings or poems, but it's not a bad cenotaph.
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