Summer-Squash Soup

Hey, who recorded "(There Ain't No Cure For) The Summertime Blues," the Who? I imagine dozens of artists have recorded it in an attempt to cure the bank-account blues.

Anyway, it turns out there's a simple cure for the summertime blues, and as you might expect, it's soup. When in doubt, make soup!

Thanks to blogger, chef, and poet Minerva, we have ourselves a link to a recipe for Summer-Squash Soup (below). (Minverva reports that she added some previously cooked chicken to give the soup a little autumnal muscle, so if you're not rolling down the Vegan Highway at present, you may give that a try.)

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1809036

And Minerva is over at . . .

http://minervadamama.blogspot.com/

Summer Squash

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'Tis the season, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, for squash. I grew up calling yellow or crook-necked squash "summer squash," and I prefer it to zucchini, the hide of which is a tad bitter, and the meat of which can be watery. I used to like to pick yellow squash because in the garden, it often had some fuzz on it. One reason to plant a garden, I submit, is that it produces imperfection, such as the fuzz, which is rubbed off by the time squash makes it to a super-market super-slickly. For instance, the cucumbers I just harvested look pretty gnarly. They're fat and fine inside, but the hide looks like it's been in a scuffle, and one of the cucumbers has an odd twist to it. You just can't find that kind of imperfection in a produce-department, no matter how hard you look.

In case anyone asks, and I'm sure someone will do so, "squash" as a verb can mean not just to press down or in upon but also to join in a crowd of people--to squash about in the city, as it were--this according to the OED online. "Squash" as a noun may refer not just to zucchini, etc., but also to the unripe pod of a pea, and in this iteration, the word was often used insultingly. One would call someone a "squash," a mere unripe pod. "Hey, pal, as far as I'm concerned, you're an unripe pod." And here's news: "squash" as a noun used to refer as well to a muskrat--or "musksquash." Wow.

My desultory research did not go so far as to tell me how the racket-game, squash, got its name. Squash seems like the upper-class version of racquet-ball, but I could be incorrect in that impression.

When something feels as if it has been squashed, we sometimes say it appears squishy, don't we? What was squashed was squished, or squishified. ;-) I seem to remember that "squish" was also deployed as a verb, back in grammar (or lower) school: "Squish that spider, Irving, will you? Thanks."

I wish you a good summer of unsquished squash, eaten raw, steamed, or roasted, and may the squash you harvest be perfectly imperfect.

Moon Poems

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(image: Swiss cheese, the chief component of the moon, in spite of astronomers' and astronauts' protestations to the contrary)
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Not that you asked, but my favorite moon-poem is W.H. Auden's "This Lunar Beauty," chiefly because of the rhythm, which subtly echoes that of Jon Skelton's poetry.

Other good moon-poems include "Under the Harvest Moon," by Carl Sandburg, famous Swedish American; "Autumn Moonlight," by Matsuo Basho [how many haikus have a moon-image in the them, I wonder?] ; "Length of Moon," by Arna Bontemps; "The Moon Versus Us Ever Sleeping Together Again," by Richard Brautigan [I think we have a winner in the title-competition]; "The Moon Was But a Chin of Gold," by Emily Dickinson [I think we have a winner in the comparison-competition, and what a shock that's it's D: never mess with Ms. D.]; "Blood and the Moon," by W.B. Yeats; and "And the Moon and the Stars and the World," by Charles Bukowski.

Moon-Shot: The Missing Article

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(image: Jules Verne)
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Moon-Shot 1969: The Missing Article


Somewhere between the moon and the Sierra Nevada,
our TV-reception got fizzed. We leaned in toward
the Zenith set that labored to freight us images
of Armstrong. Outside, illusory sky still pretended
to be blue. " . . .one small step for man, one
giant leap for mankind," said the Zenith, and
I knew the first man on the moon had flubbed
prefabricated lines. The article "a" was missing,
and without it, "man" and "mankind" meant pretty
much the same thing in 1969. The article "a"

is still missing. It tumbles in the Milky Way,
silent in an unspoken vacuum. Yes, yes, I was
properly amazed like everyone else. And a little
sad. After a cumbersome astronaut stepped off a
ladder and set feet, the moon misplaced its
mythology and became dirt and a destination.

Man In A Hole

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Man In A Hole

In summer's citified humidity, one man
pierced a street's asphalt hide with a
jack-hammer. Then someone else in a yellow
back-hoe dug something like a grave. Soon
another man was standing in the hole. Orange
plastic cones stood sentry around him. He
wore a white hard-hat and an orange vest.
Cars passed thickly by on both sides, hauling
their noise, puffing exhaust-fumes, hardly
slowing down. The man's height had been cut
in half. His co-workers looked down at him
expectantly, as if he could fix anything--
sewer, water, electricity, earthquakes.
"People give me shit," he yelled, "and
I am tired of it."


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

W. H. Auden Site

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I recently ran across a site dedicated to W.H. Auden, master of lyric poems and long poems, genius at incorporating vocabulary and diction from a wide spectrum of sources into his poetry. His most anthologized poems include "Lullaby," "If I Could Tell You," "In Memoriam: W.B. Yeats," and "Musee des Beaux Arts." Collected Shorter Poems and Collected Longer Poems are both available from Random House/Vintage.

Here is a link to the site:

http://audensociety.org/

Do You Like The Blues?

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(photo: Albert King, with smoke, perhaps from his guitar)
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Embarking on the great cleaning of the office, I exhumed The Best of Blues: The Essential CD Guide. Yes, I know, CDs belong on the scrap-heap of old technology, along with those massive 8-track contraptions. At least one may transfer the contents of a CD to one's Itunes (or whatever) "library," although a library is, by etymological definition, supposed to be composed of books.

At any rate, Roger St. Pierre put together this guide, which was published by Collins Publishers, San Francisco, in 1993. The nifty little book is postcard-size.

Not that you asked, but among my favorite blues artists, in no particular order, are Big Mama Thornton, Robert Johnson, Albert King, B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Bessie Smith, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Ray Charles, Mac Rebennack (Dr. John), and Son House (I just love his "John the Revelator"). I know: it's a terribly traditional list. Studies have shown that Robert Cray (from Tacoma) and Eric Clapton apparently know something about playing blues-guitar, too.

A Great Baseball-Blog

...And speaking, that is to say writing, of baseball, I'll now pass on a link to a terrific baseball blog--with poetry; but baseball fans are not to worry: the blog is all baseball all the time (and from Chicago, where the Cubs will one day win it all again--in the same century when the S.F. Giants do, perhaps, and alas):


http://the-daily-something.blogspot.com/

Baseball Poetry

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Here comes (American) baseball's All-Star game, and here's a collection of baseball poetry:

Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, edited by Brooke Howath, Tim Wales, and Elinor Nauen.

It would be interesting (to me) to see poems about soccer (a.k.a. football), cricket, hockey, fencing, etc., from other cultures.

I thought I'd posted "Sestina: The Game of Baseball" before, but I guess not. I embarked on writing the poem because I thought the repetition and figurative circularity of the sestina-form might go well with baseball, a highly ritualized sport. Anyway, here it is:

Sestina: The Game of Baseball

The circle is the center of the game:
The trip from home to home; mound; ball.
And Baseball’s creed is O-penness: fields;
Gloves like birds’ mouths; past fences lies forever.
The game plays out in formulae of three.
Combinations interlock like rings.

Grave umpires speak in prophecy that rings
Out in the voice of Moses. Out, Strike, Ball
Mean really Shame, Yes, No! The game
Is subtle, though, like its faintly sloping fields.
And indefinite: A game can last forever
In theory, infinitely tied at 3 to 3.

Though rules say nine may play, it’s often three
Who improvise a play within the game.
(Tinkers, Evers, Chance) . Pitcher lends ball
To air. Potentiality of bat rings
With power in that instance. All fields
Beckon to innocence and hope forever.

One chance at a time drops from forever.
Player with a caged face grabs for ball.
But batter knocks ball back into the ring
Of readiness, at which point one of three
Things happen that can happen in the game:
Safe or Out or Ball-Beyond-All-Fields:

Home run. Inspire the ball past finite fields,
And you voyage honored on the sea that rings
The inner island. Sail home, touch three
White islands, Hero. Gamers since forever
Have tried to sail past limits of the game,
Shed physics’ laws, hold Knowledge like a ball.

To know this game you have to know the ball,
An atom when contrasted with green fields—
Less than orange, white with pinched rings
Of stitches ridged for grip. With ball come three
Essential tasks: throw, catch, bat. These are forever
Of the Circle in the Center of the Game.

Dropped in the fluid game, the solid ball
Starts widening rings of chance, concentric threes
That open out into the Field. Baseball. Forever.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Memo From November 6th Street

"November 6th Street" in Memphis connects to Monroe Avenue (among other streets and avenues)about a block from Main Street. The name of the street commemorates a day (in 1934?) when an arrangement was reached between the city of Memphis and the federal government whereby the Tennessee Valley Authority got funded.
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Memo From November 6th Street

They make it work somehow in Memphis,
bluff buttressed against an oceanic
river. Vines overwhelm scruffy trees,
weariness overtakes work, and Downtown
pines for its heyday. You know the story:
Handy, Rufus, B.B., Elvis, Booker T.
& them fused grooves like welders
building barges bound for big water.
They made it work somehow.

Sir, ma'am, if you want to, you can
sit in a black iron chair next to where
Johnny & June Cash and Ella wrote their
names in cee-ment. Pigeons and a goat
will stare down at you as you stare up
at a plastic palm tree & you'll drop money
into a yellow bucket, sit back down,
and listen to covers of Albert King,
Robert Johnson, Stevie Ray Vaughn,
Son House, and Otis Redding. Looks like
nothing's gonna change in Memphis.
Then it does. Then it doesn't. They
have to dredge the channel regularly.

Meanwhile I have to check out the Just
Like New consignment-store on November 6th
Street--Memphis, yes, sir: Memphis--caught
in a corner between Arkansas and Mississippi,
between St. Louis and New Orleans, mid-South.
They make it work somehow. Somehow they make it.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

How To Be A Cat: Illustrated

A while back, I posted a poem called "How To Be A Cat," and now a fine photographer whom I don't know has paired one of her photos with the poem. Personally, I don't have anything against the poem; in fact, it still has my full support (as presidents say of cabinet-officers they've already asked to resign), but I really like the photo, and here's a link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilarialuciani/2572078179/

I might add that the photo includes notes--in Italian. How fabulous is that? To read the notes, you just lightly drag the cursor across the photo, and the notes appear. It's the sort of thing that would fascinate a cat.

Thanks to the photographer.

Mosey v. Saunter

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(photo: trolley on Main Street, Memphis)
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There's an "orange" alert for smog and ozone in Memphis today, so it's a good day for moseying and sauntering, at best. Officials reduced the price of a trolley-ride on Main Street from one dollar to 25 cents; they're worried about older folks, as well as children with asthma, especially.

I sauntered up to a venerable lunch-room that was bustling with downtown business-folk, and I ate some turnip greens, tomatoes, and "corn sticks" (corn bread). Great basic food, eccentric servers: superb.

Two businessmen at the table next to mine had a long serious conversation about staffing. Then one of them said, "You ready to saunter back?" "Yes," the other one said, "let's mosey."

So of course I had to check the OED online with regard to these words. "Saunter" once meant "incantation" as a noun and, as a verb, "to muse," but that was long ago. By the 1780s, it referred to a "careless" walk or walking carelessly, so it appears as if sauntering may be a slower activity than moseying; that is, to saunter is to walk aimlessly, almost.

As a verb, "mosey" was (and remains?) an Americanism going back at least as far as 1829 in print. As a noun--for example, one may "take a saunter"--it goes back only to 1960, at least in the OED. I think I'm more accustomed to seeing nouns turned into verbs--as was famously done with "impact" in the 1980s, when it began to be used in place of "affect." "The report impacted city government," e.g. Before that, the only things I remember being "impacted" were wisdom-teeth.

On campus, I almost always leave for class very early and saunter there. At least one colleague I know is a bustler, and one day, as she bustled past, she asked, "Why do you walk so slowly?" I deflected the question by saying, "It's called sauntering."

I'm not sure what the real answer to her question is. I don't like to bustle because it usually symptomizes being late (speaking of turning a noun into a verb), and I like to look at creatures like bugs and birds when I walk. I also like to have time to nod to people I know and say hello. I always arrive in plenty of time.

I wish you good moseying and sauntering today.

Metaphorical Headline; Sonnet-Challenge

Before I forget, let me point out that "Minerva" has a sonnet-challenge going this week, in case you're in a 14-line mood:


http://minervadamama.blogspot.com/2009/07/poetry-challenge-5-sonnet.html

Now, on to a headline from The Commercial Appeal, a daily newspaper in Memphis:

"Mayoral Morass Sinks Deeper Into Confusion" (Wed. July 8, 2009, page one).

As with the governor of Alaska, the Mayor of Memphis, Willie Herenton, is a bit unsure not about resigning but about when he's resigning, and the confusion is causing all sorts of political and bureaucratic problems. --Also opportunities: The legendary wrestler (or "wrassler") Jerry Lawler (Andy Kaufman wrestled him--remember?) is going to run in the special election, when and if it takes place.

At any rate, the headline troubled me slightly, with regard to the metaphor. I suppose a morass--or "swampy tract," as the OED online defines it--can sink, insofar as all pieces of land, including soaked ones, have the potential to sink. But maybe the headline-writer (as opposed to the story's writers, Amos Maki and Alex Donlach) was thinking that the situation Herenton has created is sinking into a morass of confusion; or maybe that the mayor's office and the city council are sinking into a morass. But I don't think the morass is meant to be sinking.

Anyway, I enjoyed the story and the swamp of my thinking about this metaphor....I reckon "headline" itself is a metaphor--the top of a newspaper-story or -column (for example) being compared to the head, and thus the need for "capitalization." A capital idea!

Good luck with your sonnet.