Friday, December 17, 2010

Beethoven's Birthday, 2010


Reading slowly the last couple of days, I finished Camus' La Chute about an hour ago, which deserves, I guess, to be called an Anti-Confession. I'm so proud of Albert for not sticking it in Simone de Beauvoir, but I kept thinking as I read the [obligatory] chapter on 'Women I have Fucked,' that this gentleman would really have profited from a thorough reading of Sex at Dawn. So, Albert, monogamy was not your thing--nor anybody else's, so far as you could tell: Did it never occur to you that not only is it a crock, it's not all that important a crock? Well, maybe that is what he meant.

Sunday, December 05, 2010

Tea and Poetry

As it happens, I make the best damned iced tea in the world--and all more or less by accident. Comparative shopping over the years has brought me to Tazo Darjeeling as the only Darjeeling readily available in America that gives perfect satisfaction for my morning, two-teabag cuppa. That's with three heaping teaspoon-and-a-halfs of sugar and close to three quarters of a cup of whole milk. Once a day, first thing in the morning, it's heavenly. But for my mid-morning and late afternoon theine jolts, I find, Darjeeling with milk and sugar just doesn't do it. Doesn't taste the same. Doesn't even properly cheer and elevate. My perfect morning Tazo Darjeeling at any other hour of the day is, in point of brute fact, cloying. So I switch to green tea, jasmine, or oolong--and even here, in this climate, there are dissatisfactions, chiefly with the temperature: Hot tea, however exquisite, in the late morning and afternoon heats of Honolulu, is enervating. So iced tea. But which iced tea?--or rather, which tea iced? Jasmine, my first choice--aged Hippy that I am--I have found the actual experience of to be rather nauseating as iced tea. And every other kind of green tea, iced, seems, well, insipid. So, last time shopping at Longs' Drugs, they being out of even honestly sickening jasmine tea, I bought a box of Tazo 'Om' tea--which even the Tazo peoples' promotional literature describes as being something very odd--a combination of black and green tea (yech!) with "added flavors of cucumber and ripe peach" (double yech!), which brewed double-strength, with Sicilian lime juice and lots of sugar, over ice in a tall glass, is simply wonderful. And so refreshing! at any hour of the day.


But having got the minutiae of our pick-us-ups squared off, let us turn to one of the truly important and interesting matters that our being picked up enables us to appreciate: Our friend and colleague's, Dr. Jean Waggoner's poetry. All this while, while I knew that Jean sometimes went off to prestigious poetry workshops for weeks at a time, like that in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, and presumably wrote poetry there (in Spanish) it never occurred to me that my old friend Jean was a poet, as such.
Well, yesterday, apparently having just won Wilda Morris's November Poetry Challenge with it, Jean sent me her prize-winning poem, Two Fabaceae, which happily and proudly, I transcribe:









Asia Minor's acacia is praised in song,
Akasya Kolulu Sabahlarlinda,
"Acacia perfumed mornings."
Taller than Bosporus roofs, bristling
and swooshing in high summer winds,
It drinks modestly of autmn rains,
thriving in earth starved of nutrients,
yet graciously hosting the bulbul's nest
amid a sweet pea scent
so redolent of green Byzantium.

Its cousin, Southwest mesquite,
so much smaller in leaf and twig,
sequesters debris from its windy terrain,
and savors a crush of agave at its roots.
A dusty vaquero of high chaparral,
it repels avian histrionics with a forbidding
scratch of thorns and cook-fire brush,
while the flavor it imparts to barbecue
insinuates a deadly carcinogen
into biped carnivores' meals.

Both arbors are Fabaceae,
subfamily Mimosoideae --
Fabaceae, Mimosoideae,
Mimosoideae, Fabaceae --
and here's the rub: while both engender beans;
one is host to the nightingale,
the other a repellent shrub.


-- Jean Waggoner

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Reading, reading...

The pictures are of course, by my hero, my God, Giambattista Tiepolo, his illustration of the story of Armida Abbandonata (which, of course, originally, is a part, if not the whole, of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata), the libretto of which, by Francesco De Rogatis, was turned into a most wonderful opera lirica by Niccolò Jommelli, first performed at the Teatro San Carlo di Napoli on May 30th, 1770--which, I, with ravishment and astonishment, heard for the first time on ¡Tunes Radio yester morning. The young (14 year old) Mozart was at that first performance, and what he said about it has been tickling us ever since: "Beautiful but too serious and old fashioned for the theatre." Honestly, there is no ass so pompous as a kid. Anyway, the lovely, lovely paintings were the interior decoration of a private palazzo in Venice, which some rich American bought up in the last century and carried off to Chicago-where probably they are better protected and more accessible to the general public than in the Wicked Old Days in la Serenissima. Let us hope so, for they are lovely indeed.

But none of the above has anything to do with the topic of today's blog: Reading Popular Fiction, Horror and Science Fiction. I forget, have forgotten, most of the reading I have done in my life which has given me the greatest unalloyed pleasure. The fact is that, in my youth particularly, it was nothing for me to knock back three or four science fiction novels and anthologies a week--in addition to many tomes of much "weightier" stuff. It's not that I had no discernment or taste, but my appetite for it was prodigious, and all I cared about was the pleasure, the thrill of transportment, that it gave me. Seldom did I inquire or care about who had written my favorite tales, and I had no interest in such minor matters as publishing history or criticism--all I wanted, and what I got, was one captivating, (and ¿Did I say?) transporting story after another. In this, I fear I must acknowledge, that my taste for the raw product itself, with none of the wearisome frippery of "literature," was not unlike the ravenous consumption of "romance novels" by the Sex. Nonetheless, after repeated exposure, certain names lingered from my promiscuous omnivorousness: Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Frederic Pohl, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon--and today's winner, Robert Silverberg.

For some damned reason, during a recent raid on the ever-lovely Hawaii State Library, I checked out an Anthology of Horror Stories--not my usual fare, to say the least. I found the first several stories, by widely esteemed authors that I actually have never much liked (H.P. Lovecraft, Daphne du Maurier and Jean Ray), frankly bad and boring, and I was about to give it up, when I noticed that Robert Silverberg was the author of the next story--a name which rang distant bells--and so I went on to read 'Passengers.' And I'm so glad I did. I want everyone to read 'Passengers.'