On the menu for this weekend: fried green tomatoes. Man, I love them. This will be my first time trying to make them myself. They sell green tomatoes at the farmer's market, so I will load up on trial specimens. I'm going to serve them up with goat cheese, and then die, as all my earthly desires will have been fulfilled.
My own two tomato plants (varieties grown by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello -- this is the kind of seriously vintage seedstock to which one has access when both of one's parents work in the burgeoning Colonial Services Industry) have yet to bloom. I did some googling, and the internet gardening hivemind agrees that a lack of sufficient sunlight (8 hours/day minimum) is the culprit here. This weekend will therefore see not only the repotting of the plants, but their removal to the roof, where they will be flame-broiled by the DC Sun-Oven until they burst forth with kajillions of globular fruits.
Then, of course, I will begin a fruitless (har-har) battle against tomato-nibbling squirrels. So far, my best anti-squirrel idea has been berry netting. The last time I grew tomatoes, neither coating the plants with Tabasco sauce nor keeping a rubber-band gun at the ready did anything to fend off squirrels. Short of a BB gun, berry-netting is probably the most likely bet, especially if I get real serious and build some kind of PVC-pipe superstructure for it. We'll see if I get that far. After all, even if the squirrels run off with my crop, they're unlikely to invade the farmer's market.
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This is a sterotype that, while at one time apparently vibrant and insulting, now seems to be so archaic as to strike most people as a bit of absurdist humor . . . like claiming that Zambians cheat at Monopoly, or that people from Seattle always put water glasses on the left side of their plates.
Nonetheless, it is from this sterotype that we get dime-pinching fictional robber baron Scrooge McDuck (though the existence of Andrew Carnegie probably helped cement Disney's decision to Scotchify their character), as well as the otherwise baffling choice of a name for Scotch tape.
My recent trip to Scotland did not produce any evidence that Scots are cheap. We met Scots of all varieties, but didn't see anyone biting down on nickels in an effort to prove their worth, etc, etc.
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posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
A feature of my neighborhood that I had not run into in any previous place is the FREE box. People will just put boxes of stuff (or, if the stuff is large enough, just stuff) on the sidewalk, with a large sign reading FREE taped to it. I have seen free sofas, free coffee machines, free cassette tapes of classical music, and free boxes of 500 popsicle sticks. I myself once got rid of a perfectly serviceable but annoyingly ugly purple chair through this enterprising method.
The above gives you an idea of the sort of variety that is on tap, but books comprise the vast majority of freely offered items. Most of the time, the books are the kind you would have to pay someone just to burn. Outdated self-help and exercise guides are a common sight, as are new-age crystal healing manifestos, manuals for breadmakers, and similar signs of the youthful enthusiasms of the person placing the items on the sidewalk.
So...usually the stuff is crap. But not always. People part with good books more often than you'd think. On Monday, I walked past a FREE box, and fished out both a copy of Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea. Score!
The downside, of course, is that now I have two new books. In an apartment that is rapidly running out spaces in which books may be stored. Jeff and I have discussed various solutions to our dilemma, but have not yet acted on any. Meanwhile, the books pile up. Any trip to a bookstore becomes a point of both pride and shame, as we emerge with stuff we did not even know we wanted or needed, like an oversized art book on images of death in Mexican printmaking. Seriously.
There is a used bookstore near our house that is so completely overloaded with stock that to walk through it is to take your life in your hands. It is as though the building were the home of a hoarder -- the kind whose desiccated corpse must be fished out six months after his death from under a collapsed pagoda of newspapers dating back to 1924. I know not yet whether Jeff and I will either find some new and exciting way of storing books (shelves on the ceiling! Jenga-like furniture made entirely of carefully stacked books!), or whether we will necessarily pass into the dusty netherzone of the compulsive book-hoarder, doomed to be buried alive beneath overstock copies of "The Education of Henry Adams" and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."
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Some random notes, thoughts...
I have begun one of my desultory exercise regimes. I do this maybe twice a year. I get up early, I go jogging. It lasts at best, a month. At worst, a week. I am three days in now. My legs are sore, particularly when I go down stairs. It's not like I'm running very far -- just around the park near my house. I am feeling kind of peppy, though, and I have been sleeping better, though it's early days yet.
I am searching for new pajamas. Many moons ago, while still in law school, I found a pattern for hospital scrubs, bought a couple of yards of cotton printed with saguaro cacti, and made myself some pajama pants. Now, they are starting to fray and become sad. It is with a heavy heart that I must seek their replacement. This is proving more difficult than expected. There are many places that sell "funky" pajamas, but they are either "funky" in a way that is not quirky enough for me by a long-shot (funky to me would be robots shooting each other with lasers, not "adorable puppies"), or is aimed at people far too young (patterns of women with shopping bags - like wearing the cover of a chick-lit novel), or is not funky so much as insanely expensive ($200 mandarin-collared pajamas in a toile pattern: something fitting for getting up and ordering the servants around in, while wearing silk-and-marabou kitten-heeled slippers). If I still had access to a sewing machine, I would just buy some crazy fabric and go to town on it, but alas, those days are over. If anyone wants to start an Etsy business making awesome pajama pants, I will be your first customer.
My current writing project is pretty silly. I am just trying to get into the groove of things again. I am writing poems based on a ridiculous western novel called "Bucky Follows a Cold Trail." So far I am producing insane quantities of atmosphere. That's my poetic specialty. Atmosphere on short notice. Mental set decoration. This weekend, I'm going to dig into editing some old notes/poems on the 2008 election, DC, and Virginia Beach, VA, as well as continue to take/organize notes for a still-largely-in-my-head project about neurology and thinking and brains and poems, etc., etc., etc.
Also on tap for this weekend: blueberry-lemonade popsicles, fried green tomatoes, possibly a stew, a new pot and dirt for my burgeoning tomato plants, and the mid-year wardrobe-expanding excursion to Macy's. Huzzah!
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posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
Besides the POETRY ZONE, I also find myself increasingly in the FROZEN CONFECTION ZONE. For many years, I entertained the idea of going into business making and selling avant-garde ice creams. Last year, I actually made some sorbet from scratch (without a machine - which means you basically have to babysit your sorbet all day, stirring it up to make sure it doesn't just freeze into a 9x9 block of flavor-ice). This spring, I made a vanilla-ginger ice cream (again, with the babysitting). Over the last few months, I have been gifted with a book of ice cream recipes, some ice cream dishes, and an ice cream scoop. So, the only thing barring me from a fabulous career in innovative gelato-making was the lack of an ice cream machine.
Well, no longer. Yesterday, I bought off Amazon this double-barrelled Cuisinart doohicky that lets you make two batches at a time. Hey, if you're going to do it, do it big. I'm looking forward to trying out a recipe for cinnamon basil ice cream. And my childhood dream of celery sorbet is that much closer to becoming a reality.
All this is a long way of saying that if you accept an invite to my home in the next few months, you'll likely find yourself an unwitting tester of what will probably turn out to be largely unpalatable and increasingly rococo ice creams.
Recently, I also acquired a set of popsicle molds, which I used a couple of weeks ago to make plum popsicles. That's right. I went to the farmer's market. I bought plums. I pitted them, boiled them in sugar and water, ran them through a food mill, and froze the results in my precious yuppie-tastic star-shaped popsicle molds. I told my mom about this on the phone, and there was a certain silence on the other end of the line. A recognizable silence. You know how you end up knowing certain people so well that you actually recognize the substantive import of their various kinds of silence? Well, this was my mother's "That is the biggest waste of time I have ever heard of" silence. And I can't really deny it. I mean, the making popsicles from scratch out of farmer's market plums is probably the most gratuitous display of consumption I have ever indulged in. The home-cooking equivalent of lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills, or wiping your brow with monogrammed linen hankerchiefs pre-moistened with champagne.
They were delicious.
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Massaging a couple of manuscripts. Reading FOUR books of poetry, which I plan to write reviews on. I even wrote a new poem today, based on a ridiculous 1937 western called "Bucky Follows a Cold Trail." Planning on wading back into a sort of amorphous project I started this spring to write poetry as a form of neurological experimentation.
It all feels good. Hopefully, I will keep it up, and not be sucked back down into the non POEM ZONE, which though it may furnish the fallow ground that permits the poems to eventually shoot up, so often feels like giving up.
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posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
Okay, so that's a loaded word, but check this out:
Here is the cover of Tinyside #4, published in July 2006. Only 50 copies were published, but the cover image has been available on the Big Game website since 2006.
Now here's the cover of a poetry anthology just published by W.W. Norton this year:
Same idea. Even the same colors and font style! It could all be entirely innocent . . . or somewhat innocent . . . or not. At the very least, it's uncanny. Maybe I am appearing to other designers in their dreams and giving them ideas. Hmmm...
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posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
One of Jeff's photos from our trip is the cover photo for this month's issue of Open Letters Monthly. The picture was taken on the Isle of Skye. Pretty!
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