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I see her image at every turn, between the grinding-stones
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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Did you see "Kef 12" from the other day? I LOVED it.
I'm with you on mainstream poetry, absolutely.
Our living room is now much brighter than it has been, with occasional confusing shadows.
How excellent.
Some beautiful cresting leaps were observed, especially from Autolycus.
Also excellent.
I still haven't given up on the idea of drawing your cathedral haunted by foxes.
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You're welcome. The author has a collection I am going to look for. Also, I think you want to read this series he edited.
Did you see "Kef 12" from the other day? I LOVED it.
No! Thank you. That's extraordinary. I don't think I'd read any of Dumas' poems before.
. . . He was shot to death by a police officer in 1968, at the age of thirty-three. That is terribly relevant.
I still haven't given up on the idea of drawing your cathedral haunted by foxes.
I would love to see it!
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And yes, I do indeed want to read that series--thanks for that link.
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The hair darkened to black (before it turned to grey-and-gone); the eyes shifted to hazel, like m'wife's. I am not Hamlet, nor Richard neither; am an attendant lord, etc.
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Like a demon out of Tanith Lee! Are any of the photographs online?
I am not Hamlet, nor Richard neither; am an attendant lord, etc.
It's okay. It's hard to type with ragged claws.
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Have you read Tey's other mysteries? I was enchanted with the BBC version of Brat Farrar as a teenager--that was my introduction.
There's a brand called Olave that makes a lemon/olive oil that's really amazing--I use it as a salad dressing, just that and salt and somehow it is enough.
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You could ask the poet to come and read. He's not local, but he's performed in Boston before.
Have you read Tey's other mysteries?
Most of them—I never clicked with Miss Pym Disposes and we don't seem to have owned a copy of The Franchise Affair, because I can't remember even trying it, but I've read the other Inspector Grant mysteries. I have vivid and positive memories of reading A Shilling for Candles while staying with friends at a cabin on a lake in the White Mountains, I associate The Singing Sands with the same trip even though I'm fairly sure I read it earlier and elsewhere, and I am just very fond of To Love and Be Wise. (I have read The Man in the Queue, but I remember less about the plot and more about some random casual racism that jutted out of the text where I wasn't expecting it. Ngaio Marsh holds the record on that front for me, sadly.)
I was enchanted with the BBC version of Brat Farrar as a teenager--that was my introduction.
Neat. As far as I can remember, The Daughter of Time was my first.
There's a brand called Olave that makes a lemon/olive oil that's really amazing--I use it as a salad dressing, just that and salt and somehow it is enough.
I don't have any objection to making olive oil into dressings with flavor! We just get ours from a friend of my father's whose parents have olive groves in Greece and I like it so much I rarely want to put anything in it.
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I hope it is Rosenberg in the footage! What a wonderful story.
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"Dinosaurs in the Hood" was my introduction! Point me toward some other favorites?
I hope it is Rosenberg in the footage! What a wonderful story.
I will certainly post when I find out which way the identification went. (If it isn't him, it will be another name laid to a face, and it will matter to someone. Everyone is someone's ghost.)
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I had seen the former; not the latter. Thank you.
I demand a war to bring the dead boy back
no matter what his name is this time.
That's very good.
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The frame shown in the news story reminds me very much of a painting, with Rosenberg the artist who has slipped a self-portrait into the lower right-hand corner, looking out at the viewers.
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I like your interpretation.
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It was amazing! I did not buy it because I was looking for presents for other people and I am not confident that either of my parents shares my love for all things lavender (scones, cocktails, tea . . .), but if you ever see it on a shelf, grab some.
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Echoing this sentiment tenfold. However, I will note that such publications as Poetry almost never publish our ilk, i.e. the spec-po crowd (so many to whom I've spoken have just stopped trying to submit to mainstream literary venues altogether, and that's largely been true of me for the past few years, too) and that is the thing about mainstream poetry culture that makes me cross.
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No dispute: I see poems all the time in mainstream markets that could have been comfortably published in speculative ones, but I don't know a lot of poets who cross over (either way) and I would like there to be more. I still send work to Poetry, just in case.
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I'm willing to believe it's partially a matter of different academic ties. I'm trying to think of any speculative poets I know that came out of writing programs rather than other branches of academia and I'm not coming up with any; which may be partly my ignorance, but also proves the point that it's not the dominant mode of the community. I never studied creative writing in college or graduate school. There didn't seem to be any reason to: I was selling stories and poems by my sophomore year, not trying to find my voice. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I would have been channeled into an entirely different set of professional circles if I had, however, which may or may not have precluded publication with speculative markets, but certainly wouldn't have overlapped.
Ditto the clockwork, by the way; I was sending work to mainstream markets as soon as I was sending work anywhere. The Pedestal was the closest that succeeded. Eventually I chalked it up to a deep, deep divide in tastes and approaches, like playing a punk song at a jazz club, but then I read something in The New Yorker that could have been published in Strange Horizons or Stone Telling and I wonder again.