Cassoulet

Originally published, in a slightly different form, in The Open Hand Celebration Cookbook (New York: Pocket Books, 1991)

FOR NEARLY FIFTEEN YEARS we made a cassoulet once a year or so to with the same group of cassoulet aficionados each time, usually in February or so. It was a ritual for us , starting with making the goose stock from the holiday goose and continuing until ground hog day or later with the week before being an intense time of making goose or duck confit, sometimes making the sausages, making more stock, soaking beans, and gathering all the bits and pieces that are needed. We always assembled and baked the cassoulets the day before we served them and reheated them the day of our dinner because they tasted better the second day.

For the dinner itself we usually started with Champagne and oysters on the half shell, then the cassoulet with good bread, a few pickled sour cherries, and a bottle or two of Bandol. A green salad comes afterward and we usually have some perfect tangerines for dessert.

Like Bouillabaisse, Cassoulet is one of those dishes that you can make year after year, always trying to find the perfect version. We have consulted many sources. We ended up always making something a little different and very good, but always leaving room for even greater perfection next time. And it's always fun for everyone involved.

This is how we did it:

SEVERAL DAYS BEFORE SERVING

Make your goose stock: we use the carcass of the holiday goose, and perhaps another goose or two whose breast, legs and wings have gone into a confit for the cassoulet. Other poultry can be used as well, but goose is best. Make the stock in the usual way, with onion, bay leaf, thyme and pepper but no salt, and use good water. Strained and mostly degreased, the stock can be frozen, or be held in the refrigerator for several weeks, protected by the layer of goose-fat that will rise to the top of the container. For this recipe you will need about eight quarts of stock.

THREE DAYS BEFORE SERVING

1: Season with salt and pepper and refrigerate overnight in a covered dish:

3 lb. pork loin, cubed
4 pigs feet, split
3 lb. pork skin, rolled and tied

TWO DAYS BEFORE SERVING

2: Soak in water to cover:

8 lb. Small White or Great Northern beans

3: Make a ragout of the pork listed under (1) above and the following:

1 lb. sweet or blanched pork belly, or pancetta, diced (not salt pork unless well blanched)
1 chopped onion
12 oz. ham, diced
2 T. tomato purée
1 qt. goose stock
half a glass of white wine
bouquet garni (parsley, thyme, bay leaf and celery, tied in a bundle)
6 cloves
2 heads garlic

Begin by browning the pork in 2 or 3 T goose fat. Add the onion and ham and cook them until soft; then add the tomato; then the remaining ingredients. Other poultry stock can be used in place of (or to extend) goose stock. One fine year we had dozens of pigeon heads and feet for the stock.

4: Salt the remaining stock to taste, and bring it to the simmer on top of the stove. Drain the beans; then cover with the stock and simmer until done.
We always simmer them in stock, usually goose (see above). Reserve any unused stock to moisten the cassoulets as they bake (see steps 11 and 12 below).

5: Cook (in simmering water) for half an hour, then add to the ragout:

2-1/2 lb. sausage (andouillettes, saucissons de campagne, garlic sausage — take your choice. Homemade sausage will be best.)

6: Let the ragout simmer for quite a while, until the meat is tender and the flavors are well combined; then refrigerate, covered, overnight.

ONE DAY BEFORE SERVING

7: Bring to room temperature:

20 pieces confit.
We use one goose and one duck, making ten pieces each (wings, legs, thighs, and four breast quarters).

8: Purée, then add to the ragout which you have brought back to a simmer:

8 oz. uncooked pork fat
12 cloves uncooked garlic

Use a blender or food processor for this step.

9: Assemble the cassoulets in deep casseroles in the following order:

pork skin (removed from ragout, flattened, and cut to fit bottom of pots; fat side down)
beans
pigs feet (the meat only)
pork loin
sausages (cut in pieces)
confit
beans
any remaining meat
beans

10: Last, boil briefly until stiff, then broil on one side only, then add, uncooked side up, to top of casseroles:

4-1/2 lb. sausage (Toulouse-style by preference)

11: Fill the casseroles almost to the top with stock, but leave a layer of beans at the very top; cover them with a sprinkling of bread crumbs. The casserole should be just covered with them. The finished texture is improved by dribbling a bit of warm goose fat on them.

12: Bake the cassoulets, uncovered, in a slow oven, for two hours or so, until flavors are well combined and sausages are done, at 250-300°. It doesn't seem to matter much how long the cassoulet stays in the oven once the sausage is cooked — the beans won't cook further once they have cooled after their first simmering in the stock. Do add more stock as necessary to keep the liquid level just under the crumbs. We usually punch the crumbs down into the cassoulets once during the baking, sprinkling a few more crumbs over to replace them, and dribbling a little more goose fat over them.

13: Refrigerate the casseroles, covered, until needed.

THE DAY OF THE DINNER

14: Bring the cassoulet back to about 300° in a slow oven.
Add stock again if there is not enough liquid below the crumbs.
Serve with a sprinkle of walnut oil. Precede with oysters, all agree; follow with a green salad; accompany with a light red or rosé wine — we prefer Bandol red.

NOTES
The pork-fat-garlic purée touch, reported only by Paula Wolfert, is inspired; it thickens, binds and tenderizes the ragout.
Cassoulet improves upon standing. It should be assembled and cooked the day before eating. We generally make a lot of cassoulets at once, since it's a full day's work.
The choice of pot is extremely important. It may be the most significant variable in the entire operation. Shallow pots won't work at all; those too deep don't allow proper cooking or serving of the mixture. We prefer traditional terra-cotta poêles; ours measure 2 and 3 quarts.

SOURCES
Paulette Wolfert: The Cooking of Southwest France, pp. 238-240. Pierette Lejanou's recipe, not the one with fava beans — though that sounds wonderful.
Simone Beck et al.: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 1, pp. 399-404.
Jane Grigson: The Art of Charcuterie, pp. 168-171.
Elizabeth David: French Provincial Cooking, pp. 385-390. The Colombié recipe, said to be authentic, but lacking the Toulouse sausage! The "menagère" recipe, which omits confit, has also been consulted.
__________: French Country Food, pp. 93-95.
__________: The Book of Mediterranean Food, pp. 110-112.
Samuel Narcissa and Narcisse Chamberlain: The Flavor of France, vol. 2, p. 65.
Robert Courtine: The 100 Glories of French Cooking, p. 120.
Curnonsky: Recettes des Provinces de France, p. 222.

Concrete and abstract

VAS YOU DER, SHARLIE?

If I heard that once from my dad, by the time I was ten years old, I must have heard it a million times. Only this morning do I learn the source: Jack Pearl, a radio comic "Best known for playing Baron Munchhausen on radio in the 1930s and popularized the expression "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" to the the point where it became a household phrase."

I'm reading Geert Mak's In Europe, a splendid account of a year's journey (1999) across Europe, geographically, from Spain to Stalingrad, and across the twentieth century, chronologically, from the cousins who ruled the continent (Edward, Wilhelm, Alexander and so on) to... well, I'm not sure; I've only read to the center so far; to the adoption of the Euro, I think.

One of the things that makes me so enthusiastic about this book is Mak's inclusion of many first-person accounts. A journalist as well as a historian, Mak goes out of his way to talk to strangers. He looks up a few logical interview subjects too, of course; one of the most poignant to me so far is a grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm, who recalls the old man as a friendly old grandfather in his Dutch garden long after his dreams crashed at Versailles.

But Mak also talks to beggars and butchers, children and churchmen, to find out how things look to them; look to them in the moment, in 1999; and looked to them in the pivotal times of that amazingly pivotal century: World War I, Versailles, the roaring '20s (a phrase too American for Mak to have used), the Great Depression and the buildup to World War II, that war itself in its surprising evolution -- the more surprising to an American reader (and recent viewer of Ken Burns's documentary) for its European viewpoint.

Just now I've been reading about the Holocaust. It was no simple matter. For one thing, mass exterminations were not exclusively Nazi in origin: we know of course about Stalinist examples (though they haven't figured much so far in Mak's book), but who knew about the Lithuanian Nationalists' mass executions of 3800 Jews in 1941? (Look here.)

All this is the more fascinating for my having recently read Farewell to Marienburg, a first-person memoir by Claus Neumann, who was born in East Prussia (now Poland) in 1929 and came to adulthood in Nazi Germany. Claus lives near me; we met a few weeks ago at a local author's panel; I like him very much and admire his book -- like my own recent books, I suppose, it is an amateur's book in the best sense, a book written out of reflection and an urge to understand, not out of mastered knowledge and the urge to instruct others.

Claus maintains that he had no idea of the Holocaust until the end of the war, when liberating troops revealed the camps to their neighbors. This, even though he was perforce a member of the Hitler Youth. I believe him, partly through the persuasiveness of his writing, partly because even a slight acquaintance reveals an utterly guileless and sympathetic man. Yet Mak is equally persuasive in his account of the thousands of Germans -- and citizens in such German-occupied countries as France, the Low Countries, Norway and Denmark, and the countries within the Eastern Front -- who had to have been complicit in one way or another.

Part of the resolution of this conflicting evidence lies of course in Neumann's youth at the time. He was protected by his parents from knowing too much; certainly from understanding more than was avoidable from the fragmentary evidence that may have been whispered.

More, though, is resolved by considering the nature of ignorance, by the protective ability of the human mind to set evidence aside, to refrain from knowing or understanding, particularly if one is preoccupied by daily problems of one's own survival. This consideration is a special quality of Geert Mak's book: perhaps a scholarly journalist is the best possible writer to speculate on the subjects of awareness, observation, understanding, expression as they interrrelate in the accidents of daily life.

* * *

Six friends are just returned from a trip to Turkey (four in one group, a couple in another); and this morning Giovanna mentions she's been thinking about an intriguing aspect of Turkish grammar: there are two past tenses, one for things and events one's seen for oneself, the other for things and events one knows about only at second hand.

(I wonder if this shows up in other languages; and if perhaps it's related to the French system of past tenses, one of which is purely literary as I understand it, not used in everyday speech.)

This throws into a different perspective the current flap in Turkey over Congress's resolution condemning the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey early in the last century -- at a time, in fact, when such killings were apparently in vogue worldwide: if Congress is to resolve against all such historical pogroms it won't get much more done before Christmas.

We tend to condemn in the abstract things we don't care to deal with -- or, let's be generous, can't readily deal with -- in the concrete. Darfur rages; Congress frets about the 1920s. Oddly, we can and do suppress the evidence of our own eyes, but are persuaded by the theories evolved by strangers.

Terroir and culture

letter to Whiting

"CULTURE," OF COURSE, is etymologically as well as (or indeed therefore) intimately related to terroir. "Culture" has as its root the Latin colere, to till. (I bet the older root, excuse the pun, has to do with lifting-together, which is what tilling describes.)

There's no doubt Culture is grown out of the soil, and that therefore Cultures are first and foremost site-specific. "One of my proudest self-descriptive sentences is: I am committed to two notions often thought to be mutually exclusive: regionalism and modernism." [Painters, Peasants, and Postmodernism: a reading of Wallace Stevens, the opening section of my Even Recent Cultural History: Place Art and Poetry in Ordinary Life, five lectures from the '80s. Available here.]

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area -- or, rather, looking back on it -- and then practicing journalistic criticism there, in the 1970s and '80s -- it was striking to contemplate the local culture: UC Berkeley and KPFA, San Francisco's museums, orchestra, and opera; the theaters which re-emerged in that period (Actors Workshop, ACT, Berkeley Rep and others) after the long quiescence of the Eisenhower-television darkness; the vital dance scene; the development of rock music; the flourishing of the Oakland Symphony during the Gerhard Samuel years; the painting scene so vitally centered on the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts and the university campuses at Berkeley and Davis...

In the years just after the end of WW II all this began to ferment quite headily in an atmosphere quite specifically local, for while there was plenty of international awareness (returning veterans, visiting artists, refugee immigrants, the World's Fair of 1939-1940) travel itself was neither fast nor easy; the jet engine hadn't yet entered passenger service). Northern California was its own country in many ways. Even Modernism, accelerated though its tempo necessarily is (see Matt K. Matsuda: The Memory of the Modern), had a homegrown flavor that linked it organically to a California past. (That past is discussed persuasively, as it applies to poetics, in William Everson: Archetype West: the Pacific Coast as a Literary Region [1976: Oyez Books].)

In the late 1960s, recalling activist memories from the Great Depression (see the General Strike of 1934), this Bay Area culture finally blended with youth activism, early stimulated by protest against Chinese activity in Tibet and the congressional Un-American Activities Committee, then more widely by sympathy with voter registration drives in the American southeast, finally by freedom-of-speech issues on campus, generated a truly powerful though never really co-ordinated (much less coherently conceived and stated) local mentality or sensibility whose ultimate contribution to a wider American character is of course yet to be seen.

(It is, however, incipient on the national body politic. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and California's two senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, are all from the Bay Area. They are frequently divided on national and international questions but in that division reflect divisions in their own constituencies while remaining firmly on the left.)

I don't think "terroir" can yet be fully English: it's not quite fully immigrated. This may be my own bias: I simply want to deny to English any possibility of terroir having been adopted. There's much work to be done before it has become completely accepted. But I like it that it is so much in use, and that it carries with it subliminal resonances of terror. There is something profoundly disturbing about ploughing; turning the soil is hardly "cultivated," in one of the senses that word has unfortunately developed (dismissively discriminating; snooty).

The most vital forms of expression, and the most visceral forms of understanding from which such expression emerges and toward which it contributes, are chthonic (see Camille Paglia: Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, chapter 1). Culture is terroir; "global culture" can only be a catchphrase.

War and continuity

WENT TO A TALK last night in town. Christopher O'Sullivan, a historian, spoke easily and interestingly about the presidential candidacies as they seem to be developing, along the way referring to yesterday's "debate" in whicn all but one of the Republican candidates agreed that President Bush is able to go to war in Iran without Congressional consent.

It's striking but understandable, I think, that most of the "front-running" Democratic candidates agree that there will be an American "presence" in Iraq for a number of years. For one thing, they have to present themselves as realists, not ideologues; and no one has come up with a credible methodology for a quick American disengagement.

Last night's talk was a meeting of local Democrats and sympathizers (like me) who are generally interested in what can actually be done, on a grassroots level, to affect the current political situation. My own tendency is to believe that the situation is so complex, fluid, and unstable that such strategic thinking, however attractive, is ultimately unreliable.

I think there are historical moments when social processes have accelerated beyond comprehension, when political, economic, and cultural dynamics develop life and energy and inevitability of their own, so to speak, and spin into events whose nature can only be examined (and perhaps ultimately "understood") after the fact.

Several recent observations come to mind:

A few minutes of the Vincente Fox-Larry King interview, seen between innings the other night: Asked about Mexican participation in Iraq, Fox pointed out that the Mexican army is constitutionally prevented from engaging in foreign war, from wars of agression. Imagine that!

The Ken Burns documentary The War, which we watched from beginning to end, and which succeeded, I think, in presenting that experience as it confronted those who fought it, disengaged from global politics, faced only with its alternations of random technological impersonality and immediate human cruelty.

Geert Mak's book In Europe, just out in English, with its fascinating portraits of the insane illusions of the "leaders" who precipitated World War I, Versailles, the Bolshevik revolution, the mass exterminations of the 1930s and '40s, and I suppose beyond: I've only got through the first three sections of the book so far, and will no doubt return to commenting on it here in the days to come.

Always, at the back of my mind when thinking about these things, Paul Fussell's book The Great War and Modern Memory; and William Everding's The First Moderns, and Matt Matsuda's The Memory of the Modern.

O'Sullivan pointed out, in an aside, that history never repeats itself, but that's true I think only in details. It's true only in the sense that every day is a new day.

In the meantime the sun comes up every morning just as it did the morning before. Yesterday we had rain, the first real rain of the season, over an inch of it; then the night was clear and beautiful, the stars brilliant just as they were to the Greek shepherds three thousand years ago

Look, how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings ...

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

and this morning there were heavy mists as the damp earth returned the excess moisture to the skies.

History does not repeat itself, since it is after all imperfect, a human creation. But our earth and everything in it wallows along in self-correcting cycles of varying lengths and paces, and a question formed in my mind last night, and I asked it this morning of Dr. O'Sullivan:

Many issues barely emerged in the discussion: the precipitous decline of the dollar, which amounts to huge inflation in the American economy; the issues of immigration and racial oppression; the disaffection of youth and the feeling of powerlessness of the older generations; the belligerence of the industrial sector (increasingly invested in war materiel); the general assumption of national superiority (this was touched on at the end, thanks very much); the feeble press; the increasing mindlessness of the popular culture; the glorification of violence and violent athleticism; the increasing disapproval of the rest of the world...

The question is: how could the intelligent and good-thinking citizen have influenced a better national political outcome in the Weimar Republic?

Alta California

THE OTHER MORNING the woman who was cutting my hair mentioned that she was thinking of moving to Oregon, because she has kids in school, and the schools here are in trouble, and the country is changing, becoming latino.

I stopped afterward at the local supermarket for milk and lettuce. At the checkstand, the checker spoke fluent Spanish with the shoppers ahead of me, and fluent English with me. I mentioned that I envied her bilingual fluency, and suggested that she think of giving lessons in bilingualism, which would not be the same thing as giving lessons in English or in Spanish, that being bilingual is completely different from speaking two languages.

Then in the evening we saw a performance by the local improvisation-based theater group The Imaginists: The Divide / la división, an original theater piece about borders. There are twenty-four community actors, amateur in several senses, in The Divide Ensemble. Combining stylized movement, masks, manipulated set-pieces, song, mime, and speech, they trace the border concept as it has evolved with respect to US-Mexico relationships, especially confronting exploitation of labor, denial of citizenship, and the maintenance of exclusionary borders. (The production runs through Sept. 22 at the Raven Performing Arts Theatre in Healdsburg; information here)

And in the course of the performance the following came to mind:

• Joaquin Miller, in Life Among the Modocs, writes of watching, with a group of Indians, from a forested ridge above them, a number of (white) forty-niners who were panning for gold in a creek below. They stood in mud and cold water up to their bottoms and worked from dawn to dusk. At night they got drunk and fought one another. Miller tried to explain why anyone in his right mind would behave like this, but the Modoc, who lived comfortably off the land, as they liked, and worked little, didn't get it.

• By the 1830s a pleasant life-style had developed in Alta California, depending on the herding of cattle for their tallow and hides. This was primarily Spanish-flavored, and of course supplanted the native California hunting-gathering economy, but it was relatively relaxed and healthful and perhaps even sustainable. The Swiss John Sutter took this further, importing Hawaiian labor when the California natives proved unable or unwilling to do his work. Later the discovery of gold and then the burgeoning population with its hunger for crops seized California's climate and soils; settlers from the United States illegally seized Mexican lands, war followed. This sordid history is well related by Josiah Royce in his California, from the conquest of 1846 to the second vigilance committee in San Francisco [1856], a book well worth knowing.

• Much the same had happened earlier, in the 17th century, in Virginia, colonized by the English for the production of tobacco, which led to the enslavement of Africans for forced labor; and in the South beginning a few generations later, for the production (again for England) of cotton.

• The Spanish Missions in the Californias: a complex set of motives, some no doubt well meant (the salvation from pagan hell of the innocent native souls), some for a degree of wealth, much simply out of cultural inertia. The Spaniards had dealt harshly with Moors and Jews; the native Americans were a logical third act.

• Successive waves of Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews; fleeing famine, war, poverty, extermination. In the 1930s, Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl. One side of the equation: flight for survival. The other: importation of labor.

• Today's slaughterhouse industry: exploitation of cheap labor through blackmail: strike and you're out of work; out of work and you're liable to deportation.

• My grandson Henry on the roof: one Mexican immigrant loads roofing bundles at the truck end of the conveyor belt, his sidekick unloads them at the other. Seeing which, fourteen-year-old Henry pitches in, lifting off alternate bundles and carrying them to the other end of the roof.

Afterward he asks "Why is it people like them [the Mexicans] are always so nice, easy to get along with, in good humor, when..." He falters.

"When people like us?" I prompt him.

"Well, when white guys often are all stressed out, in bad moods, up-tight."

"Dunno," I said. "Maybe it's because they're comfortable with themselves, and with their lives. They're relatively content."

"They know what's important," Henry said.

Hail to thee, blithe bullfight

Forcados line up to taunt a bull in Newman



ONE LIKES ONE'S RECREATION out of doors and varied, and so it was that we took in a performance of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit Sunday night at the Theatricum Botanicum and then, next evening, Monday, visited the small but autentico bullring in (or near) Newman for an evening of Portuguese-style (which is to say, bloodless) bullfighting.

What you do not see in the photo here is the bull, of course. Well, it wasn't easy to photograph: it was dusk; we were looking toward the sunset; excuses; excuses. The bull is out of the frame to the left, and he's pretty tired, having been stalked and faught for twenty minutes or so.

What you do see here is the beginning of the end: a file of men in traditional costume approach the bull, who's at the ready facing them. The lead man taunts the bull, posing, throwing out his chest, calling him. Ultimately the bull can stand it no longer and charges, whereupon the fellow leaps over the bull's head, between his daunting horns, and grasps him around the neck. The rest of the men immediately pile on as well, wrestling the bull to a standstill.

Then comes the even more dangerous moment: they all dismount, surrounding the bull. If he's well and truly subdued he'll simply stand there, whereupon two cowherds bring in a platoon of younger steers, each wearing a sonorous bell on a collar; they surround the bull, who after a moment's confusion and regret joins the herd, and they're all ushered out of the ring, which is then readied for the next act.

We saw two cavalleros, as I think they're called, and one torero. The former faught from horseback, and their horsemanship seemed excellent: they urged their elegant prancers in tightening spirals around the bulls, who charged with lowered horns. This flirtation continued for several minutes, at first challenging and taunting, later earnest. The bulls wear a Velcro-like pad across their shoulders, and their horns are sheathed in leather, the tips perhaps padded; the picadors do not have sharpened darts, but spears ending in detachable markers which, when correctly placed, leave tinselly-colored streamers on the bull's shoulders.

The torero faught similarly, but on foot, concentrating on cape-work, drawing nearer and nearer, sometimes turning his back on the bull. The lack of swords, pikes, and, consequently, spilled blood, might make you think there's little drama or excitement: but that's not the case. We watched all this as if mesmerized; there's a great deal of immediacy and, in fact, of danger: one horse was limping a bit after a bull's horn grazed its flank, and we saw at least two of the forcados tossed.

Forcados? They're the men you see in the photo, lining up for the finale. I can't do them justice: read a better description of all this here.

AND WHAT ABOUT Blithe Spirit? Well, the Theatricum turned out to be a pretty little outdoors theater with a good-sized stage, decent lighting, and well-raked audience seating (hard benches, though; bring cushions); and this was a well-directed and reasonably well-cast production of a play I've always enjoyed. Mark Bramhall, who we've seen in professional productions at A Noise Within in Glendale, was a marvelous Charles Condomine, his physical acting beautifully scaled and his voice very expressive without going overboard.

Ellen Geer (daughter of the TV actor Will Geer, who conceived this Theatricum) was a wonderful Madame Arcati, the dotty medium whose seance precipitates Coward's predictable-only-in-hindsight plot. To me, the rest of the cast dropped away in quality, the victims of too loose a directorial rein perhaps; but ultimately it didn't matter. The spirit of the play, all of it, was the thing, and we had a good time.

Blithe Spirit continues in repertory with The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and an adaptation of Dracula through the rest of September, and the town of Topanga's an entertaining slice of frozen time with an okay Mexican restaurant. It's a pleasant way to spend a Sunday.

De los álamos vengo, madre,de ver cómo los menea el aire

THERE'S A PROBLEMATIC DIALECTIC in poetry (I associate it with Ron Silliman) between language poetry and the "School of Quietude." I think it's analogous to that set up in the first quarter of the previous century between the followers of Schoenberg and those of Stravinsky. It's a trap, this dialectic, and I fall into it all the time.

Now here's my friend (I wish we were closer; we're too far apart, spatially) Alvaro Cardona-Hine who sends me among other things his delicious little Spring Has Come (Albuquerque: La Alameda Press, 2000), a collection, as its subtitle puts it, of Spanish Lyrical Poetry from the Songbooks of the Renaissance.

It's deceptive and disarming, this collection, chastely set out, often simply a couplet on a page, his translation below, lots of white space:

En aquella peña, en aquella,
que no caben en ella.


In that hillock, that one,
there's no room for so many.

His introduction investigates the interesting controversy among scholars, beginning a century ago, as to the origin of these lyrics, and proceeds to allude to that marvelous moment in cultural history when christians, moors, and jews (my downcase is meant merely to propose egalitarianism, making common what is proper) lived together peaceably in what I just read somewhere else is truly a convivium, a much nicer word than similar greek terms too bound to the kind of partying restricted to the wealthy (symposium comes to mind).

These lyrics, Alvaro proposes, have deep roots; and I respond they probably always existed. He suggests the couplet quoted above was sung spontaneously by a farm woman. Perhaps: man or woman, the singer was probably out in the fields, and probably had that hillock, or those hillocks, the real one and the metaphorical, in view.

Daniel Wolf implied the other day a divide in music between that which

Borrowing a bit from linguistics, there are basically two ways of creating novelty: the first is to create new, never-before-uttered expressions that are, nevertheless, entirely competent expressions within the received language, its lexicon, and its rules; the second is to create expressions which are, under the terms of of the received language, non-competent, if not impossible. The choice is between saying something which simply has not been said and heard before and saying something which was heretofore impossible to say or hear. The histories of repertoire in music, art, poetry, etc. are marked by a certain oscillation between the two.

and I've been thinking about that, too; it's one of the traps that I fall into all the time, not that it matters except that when you're in a trap you (by which I mean I) don't get any work done.

(And that's just one of the divides; let's not even think about the one between both the musics Daniel mentions and the greater body of music which doesn't concern itself at all with "creating novelty," but is perfectly willing to go on endlessly repeating the past.)

Some time ago I opened a lecture, ostensibly a reading of Wallace Stevens,

I am committed to two notions often thought to be mutually exclusive: regionalism and modernism.

which is of course another idiotic dialectical trap (the lecture was an escape from it: it's in my book , even recent cultural history, commas included in the title, book available at Frog Peak Press, please order a copy).

Clearly the singer of that lyric about the hillock was a regionalist, not a modernist; modernists don't work in the fields. We'd all hoped postmodernism would get us past these distinctions, or to be a little more precise get us past the fences around such distinctions; would at least build little stiles permitting field-hands to hop across into libraries, and scholars to find their way back to the fields.

Well, as Alvaro promises in that title, floating over his oddly attractive Spanish Woman (for, yes, he's a painter, too, a gifted one), Spring has come, postmodernism arrived not without its own problematic wars but we've most of us weathered them, and can now find "novelty" in musics and poems and paintings and even examples of scholarship which might once have seemed, well, Quiescent.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday digitizing old tapes, and made a CD for myself of the result. It includes:

Four Mahler songs: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen; Ich atmet' einen linden Duft; Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder; and Revelge
Dallapiccola: Concerto per la notte di natale dell'anno 1956
Shin-ichi Matsushita: Canzone da sonare
and an unknown piece for orchestra,

twenty-two minutes long, spare and unpredictable, full of the kind of ambiguity Wolf discussed in a paragraph noted below (Aug. 28), the once-seeming-important distinctions of surface and depth so fully resolved as to be rendered not only meaningless but incomprehensible. I listen to it now, wondering what that last piece is, and who discovered the sounds and wrote something out to allow others to hear them.

The four pieces make a completely satisfying CD. Its sounds emerge from a collection begun over forty years ago, and last visited nearly twenty: but the sounds clearly engraved themselves into some part of my person, setting synapses so strong as to snap back at the least encouragement. Are these too traps from which to emerge? Or fences whose divisions must be overcome?

Do these sounds sing quietly and insidiously like the remembered (consciously or not) songs that have floated around in Spain since the days of the Iberians, songs that wind up in, among other places, music like Joaquín Rodrigo's Cuatro madrigales amatorios? That piece delighted me long ago when I discovered it among the commissioning series put out by the Louisville Orchestra; it proved that those ancient lyrics could find fresh expression and material even then, fifty years ago, in the heart of Modernism.

De los alamos vengo, madre...

I hear those lines so often, looking across my own fields toward my own young poplar.

And to close once again with Alvaro's translation:

Gavilán de noche,
¿qué viento corre?



Hawk, you that fly with the night,
is it windy?

¿cómo los menea el aire; how's the wind blowing?

Dr. Williams was right

so i'm sitting in the car in the parkinglot
lindsey having gone into tj's to get some selenium
the radio's listening to a callin talkshow about photography
someone wants to know What about camera phones
what are they doing to photography
outside i notice the chance encounter of a dumpster and a shoppingcart
there's your answer

Repoussoir

RENEWABLE MUSIC, Daniel Wolf's admirable blog, continues to stimulate me every time I tune in. Most recently:

One of the qualities I most value in the radical music tradition is its loss of certainty (even ambiguity) about a surface and depth distinction. ... what, precisely, is the surface in The Well-Tuned Piano or Drumming or Navigations for Strings? Is it the notes on the page or those physically struck on the instruments, or is it the the sounds produced directly by those actions, or is it the cloud of combination and resultant tones and interference patterns and acoustical beating? In many cases, this uncertainty or ambiguity goes even further, with distinctions between musical, psychoacoustical, and physical parameters constantly in play...

In response, here are my Variations for brass, percussion, or piano (or organ), composed I don't remember when, based on a star atlas, and premiered by solo harp. (It found its way into the second movement of Tongues, where it established a mood of rural nocturne.)

This is, I see, a pretty bad photograph. The score's in ink on translucent paper, twenty inches square or so, and wrinkled. In the photo it's more an aerial view of a curious desert than an earthbound view of the stars, but maybe that's what happens in time.

Last night's lunar eclipse brings all this to mind; perhaps that's what Wolf was thinking of, too, though one doesn't know if he saw it, a third the world away. It was a night of interrupted sleep and half-waking thoughts:

Lunar Eclipse

Bad luck, they say, to count remaining teeth—
you're sure to lose another—let alone
the years you've lived. But there it was, last week,
another birthday: now six dozen years.
It's Sunday morning, if dozens are days,
or Saturday, depends on where you start,
in either case an easy-starting day,
nothing to do but what I will. It may
turn out gentle, productive, lazy, fast,
painful or comfortable. Won't know 'til it's done.

I think of George, big George, a man as big
a his American refrigerator.
Maddeningly slow but stately as he steps
into the bar to buy his cigarettes
or walks the aisles of his supermarket
filling his cart with oysters by the kilo,
butter, a little milk, to make the stew
he liked at breakfast. Or when he arrived
exhausted by the flights from Jakarta,
Nice, Paris, to spend Thanksgiving
with us here in Healdsburg, and already
though we didn't know it on his way
to an accelerating death from too much life
his prostate cancer adding its slow work.

I listen to the gentle steady breath
of the strange woman lying next to me,
strange because, after these fifty years
unknowable though comfortably known.
she asks if I was carrying flowers
or if she dreamed it, and I remember
thinking to take some roses to the office
when we went to see the doctor. As
somebody did twelve years ago in Oakland.
Now I think of it I think that it
was I, roses from our Berkeley garden
flowers for the receptionist, the nurses,
especially Stephanie, slender, light-skinned,
regal chiseled beauty, grave, serious,
the bones i think of as Somalian,
Stephanie who said to trust my wife,
and yes it's good to read Epicurus,
especialy the letter to Menoeceus.

She stirs. I dreamed you took some flowers, and said
something was happening at five o'clock.
I was thinking of George, I told her,
and I set the clock for five o'clock
our brains are going crazy; all our thoughts
are getting ready to leave our bodies
and bump among the stars.

     Four-thirty now.
The moon is coming back. Perhaps I'll sleep.

Baseball and Boulette's

A DAY AT THE BALL PARK, even if your team loses, is better than a day away from the park; only a day of tramping in the countryside can beat it; books are for rainy days. (So's blogging.) And so it was that we went, this week, to AT&T Park, as it's called this month, to see our beloved Cubs pick up two out of three from the cellar-lodging Giants.

Baseball and eating. I can think of no better way of spending a day than by strolling down to the Ferry Building to have a leisurely breakfast at Boulette's Larder, then stroll on further to the ball park to catch batting practice and the game, lunching on whatever you find—the food's really not at all bad. And then, after the game, which preferably your team has won (though that was alas not the case), to have a Martini, a hamburger, and a Caesar salad at Zuni.

What should we find at Boulette's yesterday but a reprint of a cartoon that appeared nearly twenty years ago, in 1989, after someone broke into our house (we lived then in Berkeley) and stole Lindsey's purse, which contained among other things her working recipe book.

But let me tell you about Boulette's. It's in the southwest corner of the Ferry Building, open to the east where it looks out on the Bay toward Yerba Buena Island. There are a few tables for two and four outside, and also in the hall of the Ferry Building outside the shop's own door; but the best place to sit, I think, is at the big table, perhaps five people at each side with plenty of room so that you don't at all mind eating with strangers.

I like this kind of communal table: it's more civilized than eating at a bar; gives a solitary diner company; and lets a couple entertain themselves with sly observations of the others, or by striking up a conversation that will likely never be continued.

And Boulette's kitchen, which is where you're eating, is light and airy, clean and visually interesting, full of detail and, of course, the busy staff at stoves and counters, fixing tea and coffee, baking, cooking eggs—all those things that are so fascinating to contemplate. Not to mention the scents, of course: a wonderful potpourri.

We just bought a copy of Patty Unterman's San Francisco Food Lover's Pocket Guide (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2007), a very convenient 200-page compilation of notices and reviews of bakeries, bars, butchers, delis, markets, cafés, cheese shops, confectoners, food stands, cookware and cookbook shops, wine shops, and of course restaurants in San Francisco and environs. A quick look confirms its usefulness: it's small enough to fit in purse or pocket (just over 5x7 and a half inch thick); and cross-indexed by location, expense, cuisine, features, and so on. Stick with its general index, though: Boulette's does not show up among restaurants, though that's what I think it is; instead it's listed as a delicatessen/takeout—which is what it also is.

I'll let you look at Boulette's website rather than try to reproduce the menu here. It's daunting to try to describe it in a few words: the menu—"list" is a better word, because so much is available to take home with you—is varied and thoughtful, ranging from confit to canalé—salads, main courses, desserts, jams and whatnot. Hell: let Patty describe it: I'm sure she won't mind my quoting

Using only organic ingredients, Amaryll Schwertner, one of the Bay Area's most original and principled cooks, and her crew prepare building blocks for fine, home-cooked meals. If you don't want to cook yourself, each day brings a new menu of take-home dinners, such as a crab pudding soufflé—or, you can eat there at one fantastic wooden communal table. The breakfast is divine.

What I had, in fact, was a French-press pot of Blue Bottle coffee and a bowl of barley with a poached egg and shiitake mushrooms; Lindsey had a plate of delicious toast with three jams (apricot, blackberry, fig); and we had an amazing soy-and-melon-and-melonseed beverage, a sort of smoothie.

And then we took home a box of cookies—beautifully boxed and wrapped; the cookies themselves covered with a sheet of fine paper; and the cookies absolutely perfect: variously crunchy, creamy, evanescently powdery, leading up to a couple of splendid salt-chocolate brownieish cookies as good as any I've tasted.

Oh. And the canalé? Lindsey knows these pastries, of course; Jean-Pierre always talked about them, two scant inches across and three high, crisp and dark on the outside, soft and creamy inside, a little like a popover, but really nothing but themselves. I suppose they're channelled—canalisé—or extruded, almost, from their baking molds. They're labor-intensive. I only know two places to get them, Ken's in Portland (Oregon) and Boulette's. But Portland doesn't have big-league baseball.

Music in the night

ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE nice dreams: sitting at a piano with a couple of teenaged students who were picking out tunes. I suggested the pickupnote, and the tail of the opening three-bar phrase; then the tune just kept going on.

I think the lyrics would begin “I don't know why...”(or maybe “how”), but it was useful this morning to remember a short shopping list: four limes and toasted almonds...

A History of European Art Music, 1

The decor and tensility of Couperin
The pomp and glory of Rameau.
The bourgeois masterly Bach.
The worldly resourceful Handel.
The wit and cleverness of Haydn.
The humanity of Mozart.
The innigkeit and belligerence of Beethoven.
The scope and sorrow of Schubert.
The ardor and sincerity of Mendelssohn.
The fierce delicacy of Chopin.
The ardor and urgency of Schumann.
The austere depravity of Berlioz.
The languor and impetuousness of Berlioz.
The manipulation and deceit of Wagner.
The birdsong and cathedrals of Bruckner.
The marches and anxieties of Mahler.
The transcendent plainness of Ives.
The sensuous intelligence of Debussy.
The voluptuous cruelty of Ravel.
The sweet skeptical seriousness of Satie.
The precise lyricism of Webern.
The invention and humor of Cage.

Edges

Lindsey among the Matisses






THOUGHTS OF MORTALITY crowd the aging mind; I'm sorry; I can't help it. Not even an unusually distracting week seems to keep them away—not Molière thumbing his nose in Ashland, not the Boston Red Sox losing pathetically in Seattle, not the serenity of an hour's walk in Castle Crags, not the sweet pleasures of stone fruit at Andy Mariani's orchard, not the steely edge of a Martini with a newly discovered gin (made in Portland, I forget the name), not the pleasures of the table and good company at Incanto out on Church Street.

Especially not Matisse, whose bronzes anchor an oddly troubling exhibition at SFMOMA. You can't argue with these pieces; they're great articulations in the history of Modernist sculpture, only slightly damaged by comparison with a couple of greater Degas pieces in the same rooms. And I don't even cavil at the curatorship, eager though it is to explain things, to draw inferences, to assume certainties, to insist on linearities.

Years ago a tiny bright woman who was then a public relations officer at the University Art Museum gave me one of the great lessons in the laughably casual education I was piecing together in the visual arts when she mentioned even more casually that she always fastened on the edges in paintings. Edges; profiles; contours: they exist in only two dimensions, meaning they have no substantial existence at all; yet they define, link, and clarify.

Matisse was a fine draughtsman, like Picasso; his contour drawings are both masterly and affecting. It is a defiance to trace a line; the audacity of drawing is breathtaking. I think Matisse kneaded his clay in penance, denying himself the cruel pleasure of the pencil's inspired aggression, its cheeky assertion of his gifts.

Several times the wall narratives suggest these sculptures are best seen in the round, while traveling round them. A point hardly worth stating, you'd think: yet surprisingly few visitors seemed to be doing this while we were there. They seemed to spend about as much time reading labels as looking at sculpture—and those with headphones seemed often to be focussing on nothing, gazing into near space while listening to whatever secret sounds were thankfully theirs alone.

Walking around a sculpture is how I like to see it; often walking slowly around with one eye closed, concentrating on the constantly changing edge between the sculpture and its space. Walking around the sculpture I myself am drawing, or at least assisting in an act of drawing, dragging, pulling the constantly changing edge into a contour drawing in four dimensions, height, horizontal distance from the sculpture's center, constantly changing acceleration in the direction of my own footsteps; and time, of course. Drawing, contour drawing, in time.

If architecture is frozen music, as Goethe said, then sculpture is pregnant with music. It's a long time since I've kneaded any clay, but I think Matisse, and Degas, and the private Rodin, when they were shaping their dimensional drawings in clay, were occupying time in an essentially musical—better, composerly—way. By that I mean a non-teleological way: time occupied not in order to arrive at the conclusion of some premeditated process, but as reflection on experiences and productions that have gone before, as contemplation of the possibility of some unforeseen eventuality which will nonetheless turn out to take its place within an organically logical system, you might say, identifiable in some way with both the material and the person.

Music and the production of sculpture: constant reconfigurations of material: life and the passage of time. That's what I meant by "mortality." On the whole, as I told Lindsey the other day, I think mortality is a good idea. And in any case I have very little to say about it; it is a constant, a given.

Some of this thinking is probably triggered by the recent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangeo Antonioni; more by the recent deaths of two people I knew, not as well as I'd like to have: Ned Paynter, who was on the news staff at KPFA when I was there more than forty years ago, and Marvin Tartak, gentle and witty pianist and accompanist par excellence.

When death comes to mind—and death is never far from contemplations of mortality—I always think of three things. Mozart, of course:

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling!

and Duchamp:

Besides, when someone dies, it's always someone else...

and, to put beside these essentially Epicurean views of the subject, this poem by Lincoln Fitzell, which has quietly whispered to me for nearly fifty years:

PRAYER

Earth the mother, earth the death,
We owe to you this tragic breath,
And dark and wide if we should fall,
We pray that you may keep us all
More gently sleepers of your night,
Than we were children of your light.

Mozart: letter to his father, 4 April 1787, translation by Emily Anderson
Duchamp: aphorism, found also on his tombstone, as I recall and translate (probably faultily)
Fitzell: "Prayer," in Selected Poems (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1955)
gin: Cascade Mountain from Bendistillery (thanks, Giovanna)

Tartuffe in Ashland

THE COUNTRY'S SECOND-FAVORITE PLAY
This year? Moliere's Tartuffe, they say.
Second most frequently produced,
That is, and now its wit is loosed
On Ashland's public, and they see
That lust and greed, hypocrisy,
And false religion can be fun.
Depends on where and when they're done.
Heroic couplets, stylish sets,
Elegant costumes—no regrets
At seeing Moliere's play once more.
Trenchant satire's never a bore.

Fernet Branca

photo: Rome, January 2004

AH, FERNET BRANCA. The first time we traveled in Europe, in 1974, we traveled with another couple, who we met in Chiomonte, whence we went on by train to Torino, where we rented a tiny car.

We drove to Milan, where we had a long long lunch—I must write about that one day—and then George (who drove very quickly) drove us all up to Bellagio, where we planned to stay a day or two. As the road climbed I began to suffer from that long long lunch. I rolled from one side of the back seat to the other as he careened around curves on the climb toward Como.

I was beginning to feel sick. Finally I insisted that he stop in the next village, at the next cafe. I staggered into the bar and bought a bottle of Fernet Branca. Back in the car, I took a swallow or two and felt better immediately.

When we got to Bellagio I was ready for dinner.

Since then I have never traveled without a small flask. Years ago Eric even made a wallet card for me, which I still carry always. It has a drawing of a pig on it, and nicely lettered across the drawing the legend

MANGIATORE
nel caso d'emergenzia,
Prego di Somministrare
FERNET

There's a good article on Fernet Branca on Wikipedia, with a surprising revelation about San Francisco. I can vouch for the fact that the American and Italian versions of Fernet Branca are different, and I much prefer the Italian version. (Fernet is much cheaper in Italy, by the way; I used often to buy a bottle there at the duty-free shop when coming home, but current restrictions have made this impossible.)

The combination of Fernet Branca and a very popular American cola beverage sounds unpleasant to me. On the other hand, a Fernetini—three parts gin, one part Fernet Branca, lemon-peel garnish—can be a pleasant thing on certain occasions.

And a shot-glass of Fernet Branca can make a good nightcap. I think I'll have one right now.

But first I opened W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, and there near the very beginning was a description of an old man in the Antwerp train station drinking Fernet...

The Anxiety of Influence; the reward of contentment

YES, IT'S ONE of the couple hundred books in the case of Books Waiting To Be Read: Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. Lou Harrison gave me a copy, years ago, one day when I was visiting him, back when I was thinking of writing a life-and-works book about him.

(Count the abandoned projects.)

I haven't read it, partly because the project was abandoned, mostly because I've developed a distaste for Mr. Bloom, a distaste caused by my lack of enthusiasm for John Milton, and by my disagreement with much of what Bloom has to say about Shakespeare. Both of these are poor reasons, and much countervailed by Lou's enthusiasm; I'll have to move the book closer to the top.

It comes to mind today because of today's post on Ron Silliman's blog. He takes up the familiar device of the Top-Ten List. This surfaced a few weeks back on another blog I find interesting, George (it is George, isn't it?) Hunka's Superfluities, where the question was put: what is the most influential play of the last hundred years? (Most of the response seemed to hesitate between Waiting for Godot and The Cherry Orchard.)

Taken as prescriptive, these projects are never much more than Fool's Errands. Taken as descriptive, though, they can be very interesting. Curtis Faville objects, in a comment on Ron's blog, that one's own list of one's own influences can't be trusted; that "The great danger of autobiography is in re-writing your own history to suit your current preferred version of yourself." Well, no written sentence is good for much more than what it makes you add to it; autobiography, like biography, or history, or even recipe-books, is always "suspect," if you have a suspicious turn of mind.

All that said, since I'm back in an autobiographical state of mind, here are the influences that come to mind—influences on my own mind-formation, I mean. If you're not interested in my mind, that's okay, I can understand that, but it may be interesting to see what one person found stimulating in the middle of the last century:

1950s:

jazz

Stein

Finnegans Wake

Four Saints in Three Acts (the opera)

Picasso

Ives

Mahler

1960s:

Cage

Webern

Duchamp

Wallace Stevens

Henry James

Mozart

1970s:

cuisine

Ponge

(Raymond) Roussel

By the 1980s, having nudged well past forty, most of the raw influences—I mean those that one discovers in their informative power for the first time—are in place; they continue to work their mischief but subliminally, and few new enthusiasms come along.

Until 1983, that magic year, when we found this place in the country, and began to build Last House (to borrow M.F.K. Fisher's marvelous name), and finally set aside most ambitions, and began to settle into this Eastside View. Travel and the fitful correspondence with friends provide the new stimuli; re-reading, theater, and contemplation provide context.

Perhaps one's own life, like one's own time, moves into its own postmodernity. One danger continues: the threat of complacency.

Dry Time

THEY SAY OURS IS a "Mediterranean climate," meaning wet winter, dry summer. We had just under a tenth of an inch of rain on Tuesday, very unusual here; enough to sell a little sulfur to the grape growers no doubt, but hardly enough to do much for our poor ornamentals. The Italian cypresses look fine, except for the ragged edges the damn blackbirds and starlings make with their busy commutes; and Lindsey's garden is flourishing, thanks to her frugal driplines.

I'm worried about our pine trees, though. Look at the one in the center of the picture, just beyond my workshop: it's dry and nearly transparent. It's an Italian stone pine; we planted it and three others not in the photo, partly for their wonderful sculpture, partly for their tasty pine nuts. This tree is clearly failing, and I don't know why. I notice another, four or five miles away at the entrance to Rodney Strong Vineyards, is beginning to show the same distress; and I'm not too happy about the appearance of the three pines we planted on the fenceline out of sight to the left of this photo.

The dry weather is normal, and the heat is not really abnormal. It hit close to 100 degrees a few weeks ago, and the low to mid nineties last week; but as they say it's a dry heat and not really enervating. We open all the windows at night and close them first thing in the morning; our concrete floor keeps the house cool; we don't need air conditioning.

Up at the top of the photo, beyond our fenceline, south of our house, that's the neighbor's vineyard. We don't see it from our house; this photo was taken from above, near the fenceline on the other side of our place. From our house we see almost nothing but our own place, and that's how we like it. But Gary's vineyard is only 150 feet from our front door, and what a difference! It's irrigated, of course, green and lush, unlike the sere hillside we call home.

In fact we're surrounded on three sides by these vineyards. This has its advantage: they make a fine firebreak. I used to worry about fires blowing in from the north or east; no longer. But the vineyards bring prosperity, meaning inflated land-values; and the people who own and run these properties are constrained to keep the profits coming in. Rosenblum, our north neighbor, recently subdivided his acreage; a big winery-tasting facility is going up just the other side of our north fence.



I've met the man who owns this winery, and he seems like a nice guy—quiet-spoken, aware of ecological considerations, modest rather than over-ambitious in his plans. But look at the size of this place, and think of the money involved! His backers are going to want to see returns, and however modest his current plans may be there's always the threat that continuing demand for investment return will lead to bigger and more profitable production.

I mentioned Michael Kincaid the other day. Another of his aphorisms:

Agriculture enabled overpopulation; Industrialism made it profitable.

and my old friend John Whiting sums up the result of this "progress" in the working title (I hope he keeps it) of a paper he's polishing for this fall's Oxford Symposium: Eating the Earth.

We do indeed eat the earth, and we must eat it slowly and respectfully enough to allow it to recuperate. We are not the first farmers: Earth is. Earth tends her gardens and her livestock, responding like any farmer to the changing influences of rains and droughts, gullies and deposits. Her time-scale is not ours, it goes without saying. Much of the time her scale is immense, with cause and effect separated by unimaginable (or at least unexperienceable) spans of time.

On other occasions, though, her time-scale is impressively immediate. We had a noticeable earthquake on the Hayward Fault last week; things were broken in Berkeley. A day later there was a smaller quake up this way, near the Geysers, where clusters of small quakes have become commonplace since the city of Santa Rosa began pouring its treated wastewater down nature's steam vents.

I try to keep the cosmic perspective in mind; it eases apprehension. Given enough time, Nature will prevail. There is no right configuration of ice caps, deserts, temperate and torrid zones; only our own desires can qualify one fleeting configuration as "better" than another.

On the other hand... I'm concerned about that pine.

Cenozoic Time; objective poetics

I WROTE ABOUT Michael Kincaid's little book Solar Margins here a few months ago, and the other day a letter arrived from him, with a short poem and some additional — well, what are they, anyway? Aphorisms? Fragments?






An example:

The Ideal has limited rights of pronouncement. There are places its logic cannot go unless it agrees to be a student. (The Ideal is not known for such humility.)

I set this here without Kincaid's permission, and I hope I don't abuse his confidence in a correspondent he's never seen.

The poem he sent, three short couplets called "Down the Cañada," will not appear here; I don't think I should go quite that far. I will quote one line, the third:

Rock mirrors mind.

You can see how it would have made me recall Carl Rakosi's "Cenozoic Time," which appears here as I annotated it into a "song."

(It was sung by soprano Hiroko Yoshinaga, with violinist Akiko Kojima, violin, on March 13, 2004, in Carl's living room.

listen to it

I don't know anything about poetry. That seems astonishing, given a bachelor's degree in English literature: but there it is. I don't know anything about it, and I very much resist learning anything about it in any formal sense. I've always felt you learn most by some kind of osmotic exposure (you can follow the dismal examples in my memoir, whose sales could certainly be better), and it seems to me the best way to learn anything about poetry is to read it.

(I'd focus on Wallace Stevens.)

Carl, who I knew slightly toward the end of his long life, was classified an "Objectivist" by those who know about this sort of thing. William Carlos Williams was apparently the model; Wikipedia will fill you in on the details. It's a sensibility that pleases me: forty years ago when I discovered Francis Ponge, through the Goliard edition of a translation of his Le savon, it was his phenomenology that excited me.

"Cenozoic Time" seems to me about as objective as you can get, but "Down the Cañada" puts that into some question by, as it were, responding to it from a greater measure of detachment. Well, there's a lot to think about here, but it's time to go out to dinner.

Mortal fallacies

TWO INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS are going on within my user group (NCMUG, the North Coast Macintosh Users' Group). One concerns archival inks for inkjet printers. The other laments the possible demise of internet radio due to increased fees requested by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), which wants to raise significantly the royalties levied on the broadcast of copyright material.

The latter discussion connects to another, about the fees demanded by licensing groups like BMI and ASCAP (Broadcast Music Incorporated; American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) of commercial entities (restaurants, cafés) that present performances or recordings of licensed music in a for-profit context.

All three discussions seem to speak to a common delusion: that the preoccupations of any given Present merit Perpetuity. The worrier about archival ink is an artist, apparently concerned that her work outlast her own life. How many artists, I wonder, are producing graphic work using computers and printers these days? Thousands, I'm sure. Millions of prints, accumulating decade by decade, stacking up alongside all those CDs, DVDs, silver-nitrate negatives, Polaroid prints, shellac and vinyl discs, 35mm transparencies.

Years ago we stood in front of the Maison Carré in Nîmes, marveling not so much at the classic grandeur of the building itself as at its location, nearly a meter below the present-day grade level. I don't think its own weight sank it into the earth: more likely the accumulating detritus of the centuries has raised the city around it. You see this everywhere you study ancient buildings in the Mediterranean countries.

Then there's the concern about copyright, royalties, performance fees and the like. Virgil Thomson had it right: it's the contemporary stuff that should be free of such economic encumbrance, and the more-generally-desired Standard Repertory that should be taxed. If theater companies had to pay royalties to perform Shakespeare, if opera companies had to pay them to produce Verdi, if publishers (and, by extension, libraries, should they continue to exist) had to pay to reprint Austen and Dickens and such); and if fees thereby collected were distributed among living writers and composers, whose own work would be distributed free of royalty...

Why then a current paradox would be resolved: the Past and its glories would be recompensed, the Present and its provisionalities would be supported and published.

On this day, July 12, in 1911, my father was born. His life was difficult, his gifts unresolved and neglected. May he rest in peace.

“That’s one...”

NOTHING MORE INTERESTING than the intersection of ethical quandary with practical quandary. Case in point:

Eating in a restaurant (whose name I will not here divulge) the other night with another couple we find our enjoyment of an excellent wine list and mostly quite good food utterly set to naught by unprofessional service. It all began with our first wine: an unfamiliar white wine from Monferrato (for this Italian restaurant boasts a number of Piemontese wines and dishes).

The waiter brought it, did not really display the label, pulled the cork, poured a small amount into a glass, and offered it to our friend—a man who worked a few years for a well-known wine importer, then waited tables very professionally for many years at one of my favorite restaurants.

Half-jokingly I suggested Lindsey test the wine, as she’s excellent at detecting corked wines. On lifting it to her nose a troubled expression clouded her face, one I’ve seen before. Corked, she said; David, I think you should check this. He lifted the glass to his nose: Corked, he said, No doubt about it. Here, Charles, see what you think.

Why should I try it, I asked; you’ve both already settled it; if you think it’s corked, why wouldn’t I? Still, I held it to my nose. Corked, corked, and corked, no question about it.

The waiter was worried. Are you saying you don’t want this wine, he asked. Yes, David said, we don’t want this wine; it’s corked.

Do you want some other wine, the waiter asked.

Yes, David said, bring another bottle, but of this same wine.

I don’t think I want to do that, the waiter said; You don’t like this wine. But he went disconsolately, carrying the corked wine with him.

After a considerable wait he reappeared with another bottle, displayed its label quickly, and began to uncork it.

Wait a moment, David said, May I see this wine, please? The waiter handed it to him and David held it out in front of him, carefully reading the entire front label, then methodically turning the bottle round to read the entire back label. Very interesting, he said, Thank you; but this is not the wine we ordered; we want another bottle of the wine we first ordered.

I know you do, the waiter said, But I don’t want to bring it; you won’t like it. I tasted that first bottle, it wasn’t corked, you simply don’t like that wine.

David was quite marvelous. I think I’d like to speak to your sommelier, he said slowly and pleasantly; do you have someone here who’s in charge of the wines? The poor waiter trudged away with this new bottle. In time he reappeared, not with a sommelier, but with a second bottle of the wine we’d ordered in the first place. It was fine: not corked at all.

From here on, though, everything related to service went wrong. The first courses took forever to arrive, and when they did arrive one was a wrong dish. The second courses were mispronouncedf—“tajarin,” for example, was pronounced as if it were a Spanish word, not Piemontese—and took even longer, absurdly long. The desserts were served well enough, but for the first time the dishes themselves were not very good.

What was meant to be a rather special evening, our first dinner out with a couple we’ve known and liked for years, was spoiled.

BUT WHERE, you ask, is the ethical/practical problem here? Well, what should I do about this? I feel of course I should address this complaint to the restaurant’s management. Do I do this without specifying date or table, lest the poor service was unusual and should be overlooked? I remember a dinner in Italy, years ago, when our service was even worse than this, and a friend roundly berated the waitress, reducing her to tears; and we found out a week later that the poor woman had just lost a child to some lingering illness.

I’m associated with a restaurant myself, a well-known one: do I complain anonymously, lest the management think I’m simply spiteful? If I reveal myself, will he think I’m concerned about the profession—which I am—or will he think I’m spiteful, or simply looking for some kind of compensation?

How to deal with complaints? I think of the old story about the farmer bringing home a bride on a warm romantic evening. His horse stumbles: That’s one, the farmer says. A couple of silent miles later the horse stumbles again: That’s two, warns the farmer.

The third time the horse stumbles the farmer climbs down from the buggy, gets a rifle out of the trunk behind, steps in front of the buggy and shoots the poor beast.

Zeke, the bride screams, What have you done? He looks at her as he puts the rifle back. That’s one, he says.