Sour Grapes

(image: sketch of fox and grapes, courtesy of Litscape.com)
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I've been working with another writer on a project that is not strictly about wine but related to it, so technically our project concerns sour grapes.

At the same time, I've been reading a translation of Jean de la Fontaine's fables in verse. Fontaine stole cheerfully, freely, openly, and well from Aesop and others and recast fables in verse. He was born in 1621 and died in 1695, by the way.

The edition I'm reading is from Penguin, translated by James Michie, with an introduction by Geoffrey Grigson.

Arguably the most famous fable from Fontaine (although not original to him) is the one about the tortoise and the hare. In fact, yesterday I asked a hard-working cashier if she were working too hard, and she said, "No, just steadily," and I said, "Slow and steady wins the race," and she said, "Yep, that's the way it worked with the turtle and the rabbit."

The second most famous fable (again, this is contestable) may be the one about the fox and the grapes. Because the fox can't get the grapes, he (or she) allows how he or she didn't really want them, and down the ages has come the phrase "sour grapes," except now it's applied to people who express disappointment after not getting what they want. Here's how Fontaine's fable ends, in translation:

Wasn't he wise to say they were unripe
Rather than whine and gripe?

So the point of the fable seems to be that instead of whining, the fox simply suggested that the grapes weren't ripe anyway yet and thereby kept his cool. I think our notion of "sour grapes" has drifted since then, and note that the grapes are not sour as in fermented (wine) but sour as in not yet full of enough sugar (unripe).

By the way, the illustrations for this edition are by J. J. Grandville, and they just slay me. I love sketches of animals that are fully costumed in human clothing. You get this sort of thing in Beatrix Potter books. The key is that the animals are not sentimentalized. Yes, they're personified, obviously, but they maintain their full animal-identity, and the effect is to make the costumes seem a bit much, not the animals. Perhaps my favorite animal-in-clothes sketch is in the Potter books; it is one of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, a frog. A most dignified frog.

The River Moved

(image: Tower Rock, Perry County, Missouri)
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The River Moved
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I get used to watching rivers move from up
to down. Then someone will remind me,
"The river used to be here until it moved,"
and I picture rivers walking slowly across
plains, opening another canyon for themselves,
going underground for a spell, or running into
dams--nibbled by turbines and turned into
a lake that sits and waits but never loses
its desire to find a sea. The way rivers move's
a note slowly written in cursive to time, whose
mail historians and geologists open. For instance
the famous river-boat that sank's buried on
a dry plain now because the big river moved.
"It's just a grave now," someone said. "Bones
are down there, remember. No one wants to dig."
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Corresponding With Nostalgia

Nostalgia's a fact of life because it springs from routine, it provides an easy if illusory alternative to bothersome change, and it may be legitimately related to things that worked pretty well in our lives. Things in the past were not necessarily worse, even though our tendency is to over-estimate them (arguably).

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In my case, an example of the latter (things worked all right) would be . . . the post office. In a relatively remote mountain-town, the post-office provided one obvious link to the world at large. It provided one of the most stable routine's of the day--going to get the mail.

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I inherited my father's 1969 Ford F-100 pickup, which I am steadily refurbishing but not restoring; he purchased it new, and by 1997, when we left us, he had put fewer than 50,000 miles on it. Here's a rough guess: at least 25% of those miles were put on when he drove the truck to town to "get the mail." (We had no rural delivery, except of a newspaper or two.) The round-trip was probably around 3 miles.

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I also remember liking the musty smell of the old post office; oddly enough, my dad helped build the new post-office (which is now old), including a nice stone-facade in which he embedded venerable gold-mining implements. I also liked the highly ritualized transactions of buying stamps, getting mail-orders, opening the wee mailbox, and so on.

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One ritual that still obtains in the town is that, when someone dies--especially after a long illness and even if they have moved away--someone attaches a notice of the event to the glass doors of the post office. Email and voice-mail have yet to replace this mode of communication that precedes an official obituary.

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Post-offices still seem busy, but I suspect they're far less busy with personal correspondence, which is delivered via various incarnations of phones and computers (and phones are computers). At the same time, neuroscientists might argue (I guess) that nostalgia is a matter of electrons, too--located in the electrical wiring of our brains.

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A wee ballad, at any rate (and postal rates always go up; why, in my day, a stamp cost only . . .):

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Corresponding With Nostalgia

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The correspondence used to be

Composed of pulp and ink,

Now seems elaborate and slow,

Indeed antique, I think.

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The mail comes digitally now,

Encoded on the air.

Yes, personality persists.

And no, it itsn't fair

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To say we write robotically.

The wait and weight of post--

The palpability of what

I read, I miss the most.

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Yet now I'm totally plugged in,

Am tethered to my screens.

I send and post, receive and text.

("Text" now's a verb, it seems.)

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A letter to Nostalgia, yes:

I think that's what I'll write.

It will come back: "No such address."

Electrons are Nostalgia's site.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Edward Thomas, part two--or Ulex europæus

Since last I posted about Edward Thomas, I took a walk--or an "urban hike." A walk (or similar kind of basic exercise) has to be one of the least expensive, most effective elixirs. The body and mind say, "Hey, thanks for the walk."

Thomas liked to walk, too; more specifically, as Peter Sachs writes in the intro to the collection I'm reading, Thomas liked roads, walking them. My sense is his average distances were much longer than mine, and his roads were "country," whereas mine (at the moment) are urban/suburban. Here's part of a poem by Thomas that seems to have sprung from a walk:

[from] The Lofty Sky

by Edward Thomas

Today I want the sky,
The tops of the high hills,
Above the last man's house,
His hedges, and his cows,
Where, if I will, I look
Down even on sheep and rook,
And of all things that move
See buzzards only above:--
Past all trees, past furze
And thorn, where naught deters
The desire of the the eye
For sky, nothing but sky.


Thomas seems to have wanted to get some height on this walk. The poem could be placed in tradition of "prospect" poems in which the speaker looks out over a "prospect" or a landscape. Lots of these got written in the late 18th/early 19th century, although it's hard to imagine any poetic era anywhere that didn't include such poems. You know, you take a walk, you reach a perch of some kind, you look, you see, and later you remember and write. Or maybe you write on the spot. That never worked for me.

By the way, according to the OED online, "furze" is a popular name for Ulex europæus, which is a thorny evergreen bush that has yellow flowers (according the OED) and is also called "gorse" by some. By gee, by gosh, by gorse, by golly, by gum.

Happy Mother's Day (which originated in an anti-war movement, incidentally--you knew that), and happy walking or otherwise basic-exercising, and no, you don't need find a big ol' hill. Huff, puff.

One from Edward Thomas

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*(image: Edward Thomas)
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The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is often grouped with that of other World War I British poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegried Sassoon, chiefly because Thomas was killed in the war (he volunteered for the army, as he was too old to be drafted), but also because he did write a few poems when he was serving in France, before he was killed by artillery-fire.

But most of his poetry concerns rural Britain, is closely observed, and--although it deploys conventional rhyme and meter--is plainspoken. Thomas made his living chiefly as a "literary journalist"--writing reviews, editing anthologies, etc., and he was an early champion of Robert Frost's poetry. Thomas liked the way Frost had ignored a lot of conventional poetic diction and written precisely but plainly. Thomas himself first published his poetry under a pen-name. Then, after Thomas's death, Walter de la Mare put together a collection. I've been reading a relatively new paperback edition from Handsdel Books, with a nice introduction by Peter Sacks.

Here's a short poem related to May from the book:

The Cherry Trees

by Edward Thomas

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

Did I mention that, like Frost, Thomas could be a bit glum, even before World War I came along?

Spuds

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After a three-year hiatus, I'm going to plant some potatoes. Yukon Gold is the choice, ordered (as "sets") a bit late from a Midwest nursery-company. For some reason, I like having spuds in the ground out there. Looks like we'll have lettuce, carrots, and (green) onions, too, as well as tomatoes, although the latter ripen rather late in our global niche.

I grew up hearing potatoes sometimes referred to as "spuds." According to the OED online, this slang-term for potato emerged rather late, preceded by "spud" (as noun) as referring to a variety of tools, mostly small ones used for digging but also kinds of knives. Here is an example of the potato-reference:

1860 Slang Dict. 225 In Scotland, a spud is a raw potato; and roasted spuds are those cooked in the cinders with their jackets on.


In spite of the syntax, the spuds are the ones with their jackets on, not the cinders. One whom I know well has always found the reference to "potatoes with their jackets on" most humorous; it's a reference that appears in many cook-books, and it is charming to think of spuds going to a tailor to get fitted for potato-blazers.

Spuds
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Potatoes grow out of potatoes like an
underground dynasty while the rest
of agriculture bustles above-ground
with blossoms, pods, and fruits.
Potatoes multiply themselves in sequestered
arithmetic. They send up gestures
of leaves to appease sunlight. Meanwhile,
they populate their tomb, glow inwardly,
will stand for harvest or sit tight--possess
a kind of divine patience, an honest secrecy.
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Spuds aren't glamorous, decorative,
geometric, or vibrant. They're lumpy,
plain, idiosyncratic, and common. They
get along with rocks, advise moles, ignore
frost, and huddle in carbohydrate caucuses.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Philo-Silly

So we have a two-day "Reading Period" between the end of classes, a weekend, and final-exams. Given the rhythms of the academic year, this "Reading Period" is more often a period in which to collapse, or take in some oxygen, get silly, or otherwise recover. I know academia looks easy, but it's a bit of a long haul from late August through end-of-May, at least for the gray matter.

I decided to get silly and write some doggerel about philosophy, in the spirit of Reading Period, and recalling certain blue-book exams I took many moons ago. Or maybe it's catterel. Cats do tend to get that look on their faces that suggests, "I'm afraid I cannot possibly consider your request, as it conflicts with my ontology."

Philo-Silly

You can't shake Zeno's hand.
Socrates: a syllogistic man.
Look for Plato in a cave--
but only ideally, you knave.
According to Aristotle,
bottle embodies Bottle.
Nietzsche was a Super guy
who went a bit cuckoo--why?
Just to spite us, Heraclitus
said change will always change us.
Enough with playing games,
said William (not Hank) James:
How do ideas work all day,
and Say affects Do in just what way?
Sartre made a kind of cafe art
out of making meaning: to start,
you say that things are just absurd.
In the Beginning, was the Word.
Marx was one classy, bearded dude
who thought the Ruling Class was rude.
Descartes thought, thus thought he was.
Cogito, ergo Doritos, Cuz.
Spinoza knows a thing called God--
the only Substance--how very odd.
Sophie and Phil went up the hill,
then took Fig Newton's gravity pill.
Be, know, think, define, and do--
philo-silly on the nutshell. Whew.


Hans Ostrom

Plumber

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Plumber
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The plumber that summer was busy. So
many pipes seemed clogged or rusted, hence
entrusted to this fitter of tubes that transfer
effluvia and water. What was odder was
the silence of the plumber, who only sat
and smoked on breaks, would not characterize
the leaks and clogs but only fix them--with
skill firmly fitted to a will; then he would
present us, with deeply dirty hands, a bill,
which we were glad to pay, and after which
the silent plumber spoke: "I don't think
you'll have any more trouble with those
pipes," and indeed the pipes seemed to
work only too well, as if afraid the plumber
in a fit might return with a wrench in his hand.
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Basketball

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Basketball

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Only ten persons are allowed on the gleaming

dance-floor at a time, though thousands may

crowd edges of the rectangle and loom in galleries.

Also, two or three jesters dresssed in stripes

may intermingle, interrupt, blow whistles,

and make humorous gestures. The ten dancers

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improvise in clothes not dissimilar to underwear.

The ritual expresses a bifurcated attitude toward

a brown sphere. One person for instance may

desire the sphere so much as to reach, jump, dive,

beg, or flail for it; may hold it close, even dance

with it. An instant later, the same person may

cast the sphere away as if it were accursed or

diseased. Clearly, the drama partly concerns love,

possession, covetousness, fear, and fickleness.

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There are two symbolic window-panes, with

hoops and nets attached to them, at either

end of the rectangle. These installations

are supplemented by line-drawings on

the dance-floor. It is all art: set-decoration,

of interest but not crucial. Often the brown

sphere falls through those hoops and nets,

and such an accident seems to affect the crowd.

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The whole activity seems to be a privileged,

ceremonial performance much obsessed with

height and time. Indeed, a clock looms

high above the dancers, well out of reach;

a sense of haste often pervades the dance.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Biblical Capitalism?

I was on my way to a used bookstore today when I drove past a church, and it had one of those signs on which you can change the words as often as you like. It is a Presbyterian Church.

The sign read, "Capitalism/Biblical/Practical." I thought at first that the sign referred to three different worldviews or epistemologies. You know, like C, B, or P: choose one! But then I realized (correctly, I think; or if not, then my realization was a delusion) that the sign was suggesting capitalism was not just practical but supported by the Bible.

Is that theologically and historically correct? --To assert that capitalism is Biblical? I don't think it is. Isn't capitalism as we know it more or less one function of industrial society? And I don't think the words "capital" or "capitalism" appear in the Bible, in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or English. We'll leave aside, for the moment, what Jesus's attitude toward wealth seems to be in the Gospels. Is there an Aramaic equivalent to "capitalism"? Hmmmm.

Anyway, at least the sign made me wonder, and I do know that the "gospel of wealth" is popular in certain Christian circles. To which I say, "Oy," or maybe "Get thee behind me."

I expended some cash but not real capital on the following books:

A first edition of Karl Shapiro's Essay On Rime, a book-length poem about prosody. (Hey, watch the prof. party down at a used bookstore.)

Oxford Blood, a mystery novel by Antonio Fraser, widow of Harold Pinter. I once interviewed her about her book on Henry VIII's wives. It was one of my favorite interviews during my three years as a part-time "books" columnists. Pinter called her during the interview--honest, I'm not lying. He did not ask her to put me on the phone. Oh, well. One with whom I live will read the mystery first. It has already disappeared into her reading-sphere.

And Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics, by Jeremy Schaap.

I didn't find any books on Biblical, practical capitalism, but I must also admit that I did not look for any.

Rained So Hard

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Rained So Hard
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It rained so hard the roof started barking
and woke me up to a satisfactory feeling.
I got up and looked outside, saw how much
and fast water'd fallen in that prehistoric
way, where clouds bunch up, get weighty
gray with devaporated wet, set themselves
just so, separate water into individual
pearls, let go, and give them graciously
to gravitational pull. Hey, I'd have to check
with theologians and meteorologists, but
there might be molecules of perspiration
from Buddha, Moses, Jesus, the Prophet, and
Confucius, or from just plain folk, in a drop
that hits your roof or hand, and the thought
of that's satisfactory, too--is what I was
thinking in my groggy condition when
I heard that hard rendition of rain working
angles overhead. Satisfied, I went back to bed.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

New Poet Laureate For Tacoma

Poet and spoken-word artist Antonio Edwards is the new (and second) Poet Laureate of Tacoma. Edwards hails originally from Brooklyn and is a splendid performer of his pieces, as witnessed last Thursday night, when the announcement was made and several poets read/performed.

Edwards takes over from Bill Kupinse, who was named the first Poet Laureate of Tacoma last year (and who happens to be my colleague). It's a post sponsored by Urban Grace Church, and it is one based upon a model used in San Francisco, where a church sponsors a poet laureate. Tad Monroe, the pastor at Urban Grace, is also a poet.

The fusion of poetry, community, and spirituality that the laureate position represents and promotes is splendid--and somehow well suited to Tacoma, a bit of a counter-intuitive city that often mixes things in unexpected ways.

Novelist Rescued

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(image: Florida swamp)
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Novelist Rescued From Becoming Genius
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He got lost in his plots. Ten drafts later,
his characters went looking for him, found
him in a Florida swamp, nursed him back
to writing. "Just tell our stories, will you?"
they asked. "But I'm a genius," he explained.
"I can't just be telling stories." The characters
looked embarrassed for him. "What is it"?
he asked. "What's the matter?"
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"Well," said one of them, "that genius-test
you took? --The result turned out to be
a false-positive." "You mean . . .?" he said.
A character picked up the novelist's crest,
which had fallen. The character explained,
"You're just a story-teller. Sentences and
paragraphs--that sort of thing." The former
genius said, "This reminds me of the time
one of you showed up at an anti-war rally
costumed as Napoleon because you'd just
come from a dress-rehearsal, and then . . . ."
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom