Though I haven't mentioned poetry lately, I have continued to read it, even amid the toils of Moby-Dick and Great Expectations. Specifically, I have continued to slowly copy out Wordsworth's The Prelude.

When I say "slowly," I mean "slowly." For some reason this copying project is advancing at glacial speed. Yesterday, I finally finished Book First (and what's with that wacky section title: why not Book One?), but I may be collecting Social Security by the time I reach the oh-so-distant Book Fourteenth. At this point I really can't say whether or not I like the poem, though certain lines do rise up to greet me. Nevertheless, I can say that it's an easier copying job than Paradise Lost was, if only because of the more predictable syntax and capitalization. Yet it doesn't glitter like Milton's poem does. It feels, on the whole, far more pedestrian.

This makes me sad. I want great poems to be great, and I hope this one will accrue into something significant. Wordsworth is unfashionable these days; and as an unfashionable writer myself, I like to make allowances for the ineluctable variance of literary taste. A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a very well known poet and creative-writing professor that I was copying out The Prelude, and she said, "What for? That poem's got nothing in it that's worth spending time on." I blushed and scuttled, but her comment, if anything, made me feel even more defensive of this project. I suppose it bears a certain resemblance to my defense of Milly Jourdain's oeuvre (and more on her tomorrow): I don't want to deride a body of work simply because it doesn't fit a contemporary conception of how a poet ought to handle language and reveal his or her thoughts and emotions.

As The Prelude's Book First draws to a close, Wordsworth writes:

. . . should neither I be taught

To understand myself, nor thou to know

With better knowledge how the heart was framed

Of him thou lovest; need I dread from thee

Harsh judgments . . . ?

He wrote those lines with confidence that he was loved, yet today he is not, on the whole, loved much at all. And whether or not he deserves my love, that desertion is its own tragedy.

Dinner last night, which was not quite as delicious as the pork chops and mushrooms but was still pretty good: tomato soup finished with bread crumbs, parsley, marjoram, and olive oil; cheddar-cheese wafers; kohlrabi spears; apple and cranberry clafoutis with whipped cream.

Here's how I made the best-tasting food I've eaten lately. Seeing as I tossed it together between driving one boy to a doctor's appointment and picking up the other one after soccer practice, you might call it a triumph of ingredients over planning.

Defrost 6 Harmony-grown pork chops (1/2-inch thick). Marinate them in a bath of olive oil, lemon juice, lime juice, salt, freshly ground black pepper (all randomly measured according to mood and availability), a coarsely chopped clove of garlic, and a handful of julienned fresh sage. I turned the chops often for the first 15 minutes and then forgot about them for an hour and a half. The method seemed to be effective.

Dry off the chops and brown them quickly in hot peanut oil. I used a cast-iron Dutch oven. Set chops aside as they are browned.

Discard the frying fat. Replace with 2 tablespoons of butter. Throw in a cup of chopped wild honey mushrooms, which I managed to scavenge from the forest before I had to once again drive a kid somewhere or other. (P.S. Poodles think that mushroom hunting makes for an incredibly boring walk in the woods.)

Over low heat toss the mushrooms in the butter until they have absorbed the fat and started to brown. Then scrape in whatever's left of the marinade and pour in 1/2 cup of vermouth. Turn the heat to high and, stirring often, let the marinade-wine boil down to a bubbly syrup. (Vermouth is my cooking wine of choice because I never drink it and thus accidentally run out of cooking wine.)

Return the chops to the Dutch oven, coating each with the buttery-vermouthy-citrusy-garlicy-sagey-mushroomy sauce. Put a lid on the pan and bake it in a 325-degree oven for about 40 minutes. At least once during the baking time, turn the chops in the sauce.

Throw in a handful of chopped fresh parsley. Serve the chops and their juices with rice, fresh garden greens, and either iced well water or whole milk, depending on your age and the bossiness of your parents. Follow with leftover pumpkin pie and a Star Trek episode. Avoid Nyquil, if possible.

Moby-Dick versus Great Expectations

from Moby-Dick, chapter 28

Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.

from Great Expectations, chapter 37

After a little further conversation to the same effect, we returned into the castle, where we found Miss Skiffins preparing tea. The responsible duty of making the toast was delegated to the Aged, and that excellent old gentleman was so intent upon it that he seemed to be in some danger of melting his eyes. It was no nominal meal that we were going to make, but a vigorous reality. The Aged prepared such a haystack of buttered toast that I could scarcely see him over it as it simmered on an iron stand hooked onto the top-bar; while Miss Skiffins brewed such a jorum of tea that the pig in the back premises became strongly excited, and repeatedly expressed his desire to participate in the entertainment.

Here's what I notice: Melville's outside world is so vivid; Dickens's contained world is so vivid. Both novelists use the word reality with particular emphasis. Melville depends considerably on his remarkable adjectives: vindictive, melancholy. Dickens depends on comic metaphor, exaggeration, personification: "melting his eyes," "haystack of buttered toast," the expressive pig. Melville's sentences begin as long, complex, grammatically challenged constructions and gradually narrow themselves down to "Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck." Dickens's sentence structure is less obviously melodramatic, but it does subtly move our attention from character to character, place to place, item to item while making sure that everything coheres as a single unified scene.

I think that both of these passages are extraordinary. I was lying in bed last night, waiting for the onset of the Nyquil stupor, when I read "vindictive sort of leaping," and I was stunned. A phrase like that can single-handedly quell sleep. And the fireside scenes in Wemmick's house are among my favorite moments in Great Expectations. I love the Aged Parent; I love the backyard pig. I love how Wemmick, and therefore Pip, regain their goodness in that setting. I love all that buttered toast.

I am tired of coughing and equally tired of cough medicine. Nyquil is a horrible concoction, in all ways: taste, texture, and temperament. It did, however, allow me to drown in an enchanted sleep for about four hours, which is better than no sleep at all, even though the dreams that accompany Nyquil-enchanted sleep are less than ideal. Mine involved (1) sitting in a car with my mother while she drove up an amazingly steep and narrow hill beside an eroding cliff; and (2) attending a summer-colony gathering of ominous rich people and their wacked-out children, all the while knowing that several of them would soon be bloodily murdered in the kitchen. Ugh. Scenarios like those would make anyone glad to get up in the morning.

Fortunately, real life, here in Harmony, involves a cool wind and a blue sky and the fun of shuffling through leaf piles while hiking across the overgrown grass in my barn boots. It's not a very exciting life but it's far better than bloody murder in the summer-colony kitchen, even after factoring in the coughing fits and the dead chickadee that the poodle is carrying around like a much-loved teddy bear. Sometimes I think sentimentality is a necessary balance to the mind's simmering evil fears, though there's something alarming in the idea that even a dead chickadee in my dog's mouth can become a sentimental item. Apparently, the lines of demarcation are not very distinct.

Yesterday afternoon, Tom and I went for a walk in our woods and came back with a dish full of honey mushrooms. Thanks to my friends Steve and Angela, I have just learned how to identify these mushrooms, and now I have also learned that my woods are full of them. Last night I baked them with olive oil and vermouth, boiled down the juices to a syrup, and served them on mixed greens with sherry vinegar. This morning Tom used a few in omelets, and I've also got a batch drying on the racks above the wood stove.

One of my favorite things about Tolstoy novels is his affection for mushroom-hunting scenes. I have always wanted to tie up my hair in a bright kerchief and drive a donkey cart into the forest for a mushroom expedition. Alas, I still have no donkey, and I'm not even sure I possess a kerchief, but finally I do have the mushrooms.

By the way, I am now up to chapter 38 in Great Expectations and chapter 26 in Moby-Dick. Where are you?

Today I removed a dead chicken from the chicken house;

which is a euphemistic way of saying that I scooped up her corpse with a horse fork, dropped it into a five-gallon joint compound bucket, locked the ghoulish poodle into the house, carried the bucket into the woods, and emptied the contents into a heap of brown bracken and red leaves;

which is a crass way of saying that my oldest hen, Wild Thing, who once was the toughest chicken alive, the rare hen who managed survive for a week in the predator-laden November woods, has gone to meet the Great Fox in the Sky;

which is a sentimental way of saying that an elderly, molting araucana died a quiet death under the grain feeder and that her body will now go some way toward keeping a few fox pups alive.

Anyway, this is how I've spent my morning so far. Maybe, in Wild Thing's honor, I will dig out E. B. White's essay "The Death of a Pig." He, too, had a ghoulish dog.

Thank you all for the birthday wishes and your sweet-tongued gifts. My favorite was, perhaps, the email that began "Happy birthday, melancholy baby." But all were assuaging to the spirit.

Here are a few quotations from what I was reading yesterday. They're not necessarily related, at least not obviously related, at least not yet.

From "A Letter from New York City" by Quincy R. Lehr, in New Walk Magazine, autumn/winter 2010:

One suspects that if a greater number of American writers--with MFAs or without--laid off the incesssant "networking," focussed on the good ideas when they came, and didn't feel they had to constantly get into print, we'd not be so deluged with near-identical poems and short stories that neither surprise nor delight and seem to constitute the necessary drudge work of "being a writer."

From Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano:

For the Nazis . . . soccer was a matter of state. A monument in the Ukraine commemorates the players of the 1942 Dynamo Kiev team. During the German occupation they committed the insane act of defeating Hitler's squad in the local stadium. Having been warned, "If you win, you die," they started out resigned to losing, trembling with fear and hunger, but in the end they could not resist the temptation of dignity. When the game was over all eleven were shot with their shirts on at the edge of a cliff.

"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.