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But I haven't had breakfast or a cup of coffee
Fifty years ago today, the 1964 World's Fair opened in Flushing Meadows. Both of my parents remember going, separately—my mother was eighteen, my father twelve. My grandmother had put aside half dollars until she had enough to pay the admission fees for her three children and give them each ten dollars to spend. My mother vividly remembers eating Belgian waffles for the first time. (My father had texted me with news of the anniversary earlier today: the waffle part, specifically.) In honor of the Brussels waffles of 1964, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I tried to go out for Belgian waffles tonight, but all of the usual suspects—SoundBites, the Toast—were closed. We ended up at iYo, where Rob skilfully negotiated the DIY waffles (hey, with mention of the World's Fair) and I put a bunch of strawberries on green apple frozen yogurt (it worked for me). I am baffled by the apparent citywide assumption that no one wants waffles after nine at night. It's like bagels at four in the morning. Doesn't everybody?
Earlier in the day I was at Porter Square Books, where two very nice things occurred.
First, I discovered—and pounced upon, and purchased before it could vanish—the first anthology of modernist poetry I've seen whose biographical notes openly discuss H.D. as polyamorous and bisexual. Her relationship with Frances Gregg is given equal weight with her relationship with Ezra Pound: "another young poet . . . similarly intense and romantic." Mention is made of the brief period in 1910 when both women were involved with him. Bryher in 1918 is introduced as "a young novelist" rather than the more usual and dismissive "heiress"; her relationship with H.D. is unambiguously "lifelong." The table of contents is missing her own poetry, sadly, but it does include one of Gregg's poems to H.D.—I hadn't even known that existed. I wish the afterword had not persisted in referring to H.D. by her given last name rather than her chosen initials, but at least it doesn't make the same mistake with Bryher. There's more to be acknowledged and celebrated there, but it's a better start than Norman Holmes Pearson. And I am sure this is not the most intersectional collection of poems that could have been chosen out of the Modernist movement, but there are queer women in it, women of color, disabled women, women with differing degrees of education and profession, women who had children and didn't, women who died young and didn't, Jewish women, Dadaist women, women I'd never heard of; there are sixteen of them selected for this book and all of them wrote. I'm looking forward to spending more time with them.
Second, I picked up a copy of Ellen Datlow's Lovecraft's Monsters. I hadn't seen the table of contents before. (It's a very tempting one. I need a better book income.) It reprints a poem I published. That has never happened to me before and I am curiously cheerful about it.
I need to write a pastiche of Dorothy Parker. I want to conclude with the following true fact:
"And I just got spam from Romania."
derspatchel and I tried to go out for Belgian waffles tonight, but all of the usual suspects—SoundBites, the Toast—were closed. We ended up at iYo, where Rob skilfully negotiated the DIY waffles (hey, with mention of the World's Fair) and I put a bunch of strawberries on green apple frozen yogurt (it worked for me). I am baffled by the apparent citywide assumption that no one wants waffles after nine at night. It's like bagels at four in the morning. Doesn't everybody?Earlier in the day I was at Porter Square Books, where two very nice things occurred.
First, I discovered—and pounced upon, and purchased before it could vanish—the first anthology of modernist poetry I've seen whose biographical notes openly discuss H.D. as polyamorous and bisexual. Her relationship with Frances Gregg is given equal weight with her relationship with Ezra Pound: "another young poet . . . similarly intense and romantic." Mention is made of the brief period in 1910 when both women were involved with him. Bryher in 1918 is introduced as "a young novelist" rather than the more usual and dismissive "heiress"; her relationship with H.D. is unambiguously "lifelong." The table of contents is missing her own poetry, sadly, but it does include one of Gregg's poems to H.D.—I hadn't even known that existed. I wish the afterword had not persisted in referring to H.D. by her given last name rather than her chosen initials, but at least it doesn't make the same mistake with Bryher. There's more to be acknowledged and celebrated there, but it's a better start than Norman Holmes Pearson. And I am sure this is not the most intersectional collection of poems that could have been chosen out of the Modernist movement, but there are queer women in it, women of color, disabled women, women with differing degrees of education and profession, women who had children and didn't, women who died young and didn't, Jewish women, Dadaist women, women I'd never heard of; there are sixteen of them selected for this book and all of them wrote. I'm looking forward to spending more time with them.
Second, I picked up a copy of Ellen Datlow's Lovecraft's Monsters. I hadn't seen the table of contents before. (It's a very tempting one. I need a better book income.) It reprints a poem I published. That has never happened to me before and I am curiously cheerful about it.
I need to write a pastiche of Dorothy Parker. I want to conclude with the following true fact:
"And I just got spam from Romania."
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I'm enjoying it so far. Its value for me is really the poets I hadn't heard of (or whose work I didn't know, like Laura Riding—I'd heard of her, but mostly in context of Robert Graves), but that's more than half the ToC. It was like finding that new anthology of poetry from World War I that included female war poets.
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Thank you!
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I also talked to someone on a picturephone, an experience I had to wait another 40 years to repeat.
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I have traumatic flashbacks at "It's a Small World," but I'm given to understand it's a common affliction.
I remember being slightly disoriented by the changes to the Carousel of Progress between my first visit to Disney World in the mid-1980's and two years ago with
I also talked to someone on a picturephone, an experience I had to wait another 40 years to repeat.
How did it compare?
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When I am emperor, systems will be put into place to encourage all the trappings of civilisation to be available at all hours of the day. And that definitely includes waffles.
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You're very welcome! I like to share cool things from my day.
When I am emperor, systems will be put into place to encourage all the trappings of civilisation to be available at all hours of the day. And that definitely includes waffles.
Consider this my official endorsement of your waffle-based reign.
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The new books both sound like good finds. Can you recommend anything by H.D. or Bryher as an introduction?
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. . . it does at that.
Can you recommend anything by H.D. or Bryher as an introduction?
Bryher, easily, but that's because I haven't read as much of her work. I linked her second collection of poetry, Arrow Music (1922), because it is amazing and bizarrely unknown: "Horses of Tros" is one of the poems I want to run out and shake strangers until they read; "From Helix" and "Amazon" are close seconds. The same site hosts her two early semi-memoirs Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923); they are queer and beautiful and I keep an eye out for them in used book stores, because they were reprinted together as recently as 2000. You especially want to track down her novel Visa for Avalon (1965), which I read in 2010. Almost no one seems to know it, but it feels like a secret history: the source text for every novel of the quotidian and incomprehensible fantastic. I can't find any evidence that M. John Harrison read her, which is confusing.
H.D. I love unreservedly and therefore have to think about what to choose. (I own nearly her complete poems, absent one late collection; it's the fiction and nonfiction I'm still discovering.) Start with Sea Garden (1916), her first and most identifiably Imagist collection: she writes in English as though it were Sappho's Greek. After that skip thirty years and go straight to her arguable masterwork, the collected Blitz poems known as Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). I read them in mid-college. You will almost certainly be able to trace the imprint she left (the image here is not a fossil, but an ebb of wave over sand or a ripple of refracted light) in the ways I think about words. She was always a powerful summoner of the numinous, but it is the primary language of her war poems—there's an uncollected one in the gigantic New Directions Collected Poems 1912–1944 that I love as much as Trilogy itself, a chance encounter on a train where an angel of annunciation might come as an airman with a stammer ("R.A.F."). If you want late H.D., Helen in Egypt (1961) is a beautiful discursion on the alternate myth of Troy in which Paris stole a shape of cloud and the real Helen spent those ten years in Egypt; H.D. makes it a palimpsest of the war and its heroes and the stories men tell of women and the stories women find for themselves, plus Hermetic magic. It has great evocation of the sea. She and Bryher are both great with the sea.
I have not yet seen Borderline (1930), the only surviving film by the POOL Group, the avant-garde film collective H.D. formed in the late 1920's with Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson (mutual partner, married to Bryher; writer, filmmaker, I know much less about him once he leaves their lives). I'm not linking to the BFI's writeup of the film because it's horribly queer/poly-erasing; I shout about it in Rush's comments if you want to know what they got wrong. The point is that the film stars H.D., Paul Robeson, and Eslanda Robeson, and I think it's only on DVD in the UK. I've been curious for years.
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