from John Keats's letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February 8, 1819

I am sitting with my  back to it [the fire] with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet—I am writing this on the Maid’s tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure.  Besides this volume of Beaumont & Fletcher—there are on the tab[le] two volumes of chaucer and a new work of Tom Moores called “Tom Cribb’s memorial to Congress”—nothing in it.  These are trifles—but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me—Could I see the same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began “To be or not to be”—such thing[s] become interesting from distance of time or place.  I hope you are both now in that sweet sleep which no two beings deserve more tha[n] you do—I must fancy you so—and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing over you and your lives—God bless you—I whisper good night in your ears and you will dream of me.

The complications of what's for dinner

Complication A. Son Number 2 has begun preseason soccer practice, meaning that he leaves home every day at 4:15 p.m. and returns at about 9 p.m., meaning that he must be fed before and after.

Complication B. Son Number 1 is getting his wisdom teeth out tomorrow, meaning that I must come up with many good ideas about soft foods that don't rely entirely on sugar.

Complication C. I am supposed to be eating dinner with my bandmates tonight, as I was informed by way of a casual phone call that included comments such as "we'll throw something on the grill" and "have a few beers." This is what ensues when everyone else in the band is a man. Who is providing all this meat and beer anyway?

Complication D. Tom will be working all day and will be hungry for a regular dinner at the regular time.

Complication E. My refrigerator is full of cabbage.

The solution

For complications A, D, and E. Soupe au pistou, prepared early in the afternoon. This is a fine Provencal vegetable soup, rather like a fresh minestrone, containing a variable mix of vegetables (such as cabbage), and enriched with a pesto-ish mixture of garlic, Parmesan, tomato, and olive oil. It reheats well and can even be eaten at room temperature, if the weather is sultry. Good thing I also have a freezer full of baguettes and plenty of arugula and cucumbers for a salad.

For complication B. Chocolate pudding will be my nod to sugar. Otherwise, scrambled eggs, mashed new potatoes, cold cucumber soup. Today, fortunately, I only have to make the pudding.

For complication C. If I bake a pan of brownies, no one will notice that I "forgot" to bring meat and beer. And I think I may almost be able to manage to cook soup, brownies, and chocolate pudding at the same time.

For complication E. Sauerkraut, perhaps tomorrow afternoon, after I make the scrambled eggs and refresh the sufferer's ice pack. Except that I'll be back to dealing with complications A and D again. Sigh.

Notice I haven't even mentioned complication F: driving boys home from soccer practice, driving myself to band practice, driving Son Number 1 to the oral surgeon's office, driving to the grocery store to repair Son Number 2's ravages on our fruit supply. This is a child who, at a sitting, can consume a dozen plums or a bag of cherries or 2 quarts of blueberries. I mean, I know fruit is good for a growing boy, but really.

Letter to Will

Dawn Potter

He is chainsawing

And has decided

To love me

Again, I think.

Last night he

Ran his hands

Through my hair,

Down the nape,

Of my neck,

Kissed me between

The shoulder blades,

And so on.

But I lay

On my side

In another world.

It was like

Having the flu,

Or wearing 3-D

Glasses. I was

Tired, not knowing

What he meant

By kissing me.

Maybe tonight he’ll

Still be happy

Enough, almost talking

To me, eating

Sour apple tart,

Watching a French

Movie with his

Head in my

Lap. We stumble

On and on.

[first published in the Unrorean (2012); forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]

Our band played in rainy Medway yesterday evening to a cheerful crowd that was happy to listen to us while they were waiting for the professional wrestling show to begin. In the front row sat a beaming white-haired man with broken teeth. Afterward, he came up to me and, with a courtly air, announced, "Stephane Grappelli is dead."

Half an hour later he returned. "Excuse me," he said, pressing one hand to his heart. "Do you happen to know where I could acquire a copy of Die Fledermaus for use with an eight-string banjo?"

Backwater Maine never ceases to surprise me.

Rain and finally rain. I walked out into the forest and found a handful of chanterelles. I walked out into the forest and thought about my friends, whose child is dying. I walked out into the forest in the muted morning light, and the green was the greenest of greens, but the browns were reds and greys. I thought about my friends, whose child is dying. Rain and finally rain. A handful of golden chanterelles. Rain.

from Another Country by James Baldwin
He felt tears spring to his eyes. "Richard, we talked about the book and I told you what I thought, I told you that it was a brilliant idea and wonderfully organized and beautifully written and--" He stopped. He had not liked the book. He could not take it seriously. It was an able, intelligent, mildly perceptive tour de force and it would never mean anything to anyone. In the place in Vivaldo's mind in which books lived, whether they were great, mangled, mutilated, or mad, Richard's book did not exist. There was nothing he could do about it.

And, yes, this is the great fear: that one will write a book that will not be "great, mangled, mutilated, or mad," that will simply be a "mildly perceptive tour de force." The idea of being content with such a book makes me ill. Yet, of course, very likely I have written nothing that will assume any place in the part of a reader's mind "in which books live." Nothing.

It's no wonder, as my friend David wrote to me yesterday, that so many great artists seek the numbness of drink as a respite from this anguish.

During my twenties and early thirties, I read James Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country several times. For some reason I kept going back and back to it, though it made me uncomfortable in ways that paralleled my discomfort/attraction to Malcolm X's Autobiography and the novels of Philip Roth. Like them, it seemed to affirm that young, well-educated, well-meaning, Protestant white women such as myself just had to take whatever these oppressed, angry men cared to dish out to us. That's a very limited reading of what's going on in the work of these authors, but it was also a lesson that I found myself needing to absorb, though I was also mystified and distressed by the way in which a literary generation was typecasting my kind as a way to reach its own necessary ends.

Coming back to Another Country now, in my mid-forties, as not only an older woman but a more experienced writer, I find myself absorbed by a very different concern. In many ways, the book's portrayals of gender, class, race, and sexual anxiety seem to cohere into an umbrella anxiety: how does one create the art that one needs to--that one ought to--that one must--create? Thus far, the two arts in question are jazz and the novel; and if you're interested in examples, you can read yesterday's post as well as this one, from earlier in the summer. When I was younger, I must have skimmed over those passages, perhaps chalking them up as generic "writing a book about writing" talk. But now they seem intensely important to me; they seem to reinforce my sense that we have no right to make art that isn't the art we ought to make. Yet they also insist that it is impossible to transmit the "dark, strange, dangerous, difficult" secrets of our inarticulate selves without putting those selves into mortal peril. To a forty-seven-year-old vaguely Protestant heterosexual white woman who lives in the ugly countryside where she writes and writes and writes, these assertions of a thirty-eight-year-old ex-Pentecostal homosexual black man living in Paris where he wrote and wrote and wrote feel deeply, excruciatingly, accurate.