August 21, 2009
Just found this book at an Ithaca coffee shop and fell in love. LeSueur lived with O’Hara for 9 years and knows all the dirt on his poetry. I am always intrigued by those on the periphery of genius.
Frank O’Hara’s experienced a rennaissance thanks to the last season of Mad Men. Here’s an article about how Meditations in an Emergency jumped from an Amazon sales ranking of 15,565 to 161 after being mentioned on the show.
May 14, 2009
Goodnight, Raleigh is the best kind of blog: handsome, useful, well-intentioned, well written. It began as a showcase for some lovely photography of my home city at night; now, according to its own writers, it has evolved “to provide a
thorough documentation of the city of Raleigh at night through both photos and words, based on first hand experience. This includes the people, places, art, history, buildings, and night life that make up the city.”
Goodnight, Raleigh illustrates a point I’ve realized all too well: I don’t know my hometown anymore. When you grow up in a place, you take it for granted. It’s your sole reality. You get into certain grooves that become increasingly difficult to get out of. I know that Raleigh is much different now than when I grew up there. I know that our downtown is bustling, that art galleries are thriving, that there are markets and parks I’ve never seen and vibrant young people making it their own. I hope someday not too distantly I will be able to return home and see it as the people of Goodnight, Raleigh do; not just as an artifact of the past, but as a living organism with a pulse, a trajectory all its own.
April 27, 2009
by Margaret Atwood
This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It’s the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn’t what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.
Then there’s the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It’s not love we don’t wish
to fall into, but that fear.
This word is not enough but it will
have to do. It’s a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.
April 16, 2009
One of the advantages of being a reformed picky eater and relatively recent cook is that a number of normal foods seem quite foreign to me. See: the humble egg salad. I never ate the stuff as a kid–it was too stinky, too slimy, and mayonnaise was anathema. Thus, it was only recently that I began eating egg salad on a regular basis (thank you, DC’s Pret a Manger), and it has quickly become a favorite. Last night I whipped up my first batch, and it was both simple and utterly satisfying. Served on a wheat tortilla with spinach, this is a perfect portable lunch.
Egg Salad
8 hard-boiled eggs (you can remove a few of the yolks for a healthier version), chopped
3/4 cup mayonnaise (we used Reduced Fat Hellman’s instead of the regular stuff and you can’t taste the difference)
1 tb. dijon mustard
2 tbs. chopped chives
Touch of hot sauce
2 tbs. grated parmesan cheese
Juice of 1/2 lemon (plus the zest, if you like)
Salt and pepper to taste
Combine and serve.
