The Sultana

Hopefully we can squeeze in one of the last sails she makes before closing down for the winter.

This is our backyard, so to speak.  There are always ducks, and almost always geese, and somebody fishing for catfish.

Looking toward the Fish Whistle, which serves excellent food and drink, and where many a craft is anchored.

A 17th C estate across the Chester from the dock.

The Customs House, our office base, from our corner.  Below is the dock and the river.

The wrong side of the town's tracks.

9/11 Keeps Giving

This period of the year, in which so many years ago V and I had our first meetings and fell immediately, wildly in love, for what turned out to be life, used to be buoyant, filled with those silly little personal acts of couplehood that are entirely ridiculous to any unfortunate beholder.

However, now and forever, this period has become sandwiched between two events that altered not only our own lives, but those of millions, and changed the profiles of not only of this nation, but many others: The Failure of the Levees, and the Fall of the Towers.
The Fall happened so close to us. Like the Failure, it kept on happening, with ever more ramifications that had personal impact while exploding across the stages of the world.
This is the first anniversary of the Fall in which I'm not in the place where I was when it happened. Yet the images of that morning are playing as vividly as ever across my memory screens. How very different our lives would be right now, if the Towers hadn't fallen. I do believe our lives would be better if 9/11 hadn't happened, or even if subsequent national actions had taken a different course. I say this even though, if the Towers hadn't fallen, if the nation hadn't gone to war in Iraq, it may well have been then, that this morning I wouldn't be drinking coffee in this wonderful study in this lovely little historic town, looking forward to the Farmer's Market and seeing JJ.  I might well instead be getting ready to go with my Cuban madre and hermanas to the Farmer's Market in Havana.

This is also the week in which my baby sister was killed / killed herself.

__________________________________

A dear poet friend, who nearly died early in August from a diverticulitis attack, with two separate surgeries to save his life, posted this on the other blog:

"September 1, 1939"
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Regarding Reviews, Phones, Library Cards, Foods & Concerts

Review of, and excerpts from:

New Orleans: What Can't Be Lost: 88 Stories and Traditions from the Sacred City

Lee Barclay, Editor; Photographs by Christopher Porché West
________________________

Yesterday got a card for the public library, which took about 2 seconds.  It's a lovely facility.

Today we got the Verizon phone service switch over accomplished finally. It took over an hour for that to get in place, plus the new phones. Of course they were not able to import the contacts from the old Nokia phone to this, the simplest phone Verizon offers (no iPhones or SmartPhones for the likes of us, particularly since we have no plans in the near future for twitting).
I had finally kind of figured out how the old one worked, and now I have this to do all over again. And then, if we decided to go back to T-Mobile next year, it will have to done all over yet another time. This is even worse than getting a new camera. Plus, this phone haz camera o noes!  I hate this phone.  I hate all these phones. I was born without phone genes.  I also hate it that I can't get my camera's software to download to this computer.  What is the problem?

After visiting the post office this AM, I stopped at the Dollar Store to pick up a few items like a whisk, place mats, cutting boards and so on. I had to get more storage containers. A big dinner was held at the Customs House last evening, with enormous amounts of very good food. We were all encouraged to take as much of it home as we could. So we did, including the most delicious key lime pie. Evidently there are many events of this nature held there, so we are now prepared to glean.

The poster for el V's introduction gig to Washington College and the town got delivered today, along with the engraved invitations >!< Both are very handsome. The reading and playing part is followed by a dinner at the house of the College president. I really don't have anything to wear to that, and no way to procure anything either, as there is nowhere here to shop for such things. Well, well, well. My faithful, very large India silk shawl, with silver and gold woven into the silk, will have to play a very large role.

It's the Anniversary of Our Second Date

Our Carna-verssary, as el V

It was my first semester of grad school; I was a TA. A mutual friend introduced us.
Our first date was a week before. This one took up all of the long Labor Day weekend. It began with driving from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, where we had dinner at a very nice restaurant (didn't know it yet, but that's el V for you -- always eating as well as he can). Then on to Carmen, at the Santa Fe Opera -- which I'd attended the weekend previously with a different suitor -- older, well-off, tenured professor in the UNM English Dept.

As you can tell from the first sentence of this paragraph, Professor Tenure went right out of the running because of how this Night After the Opera turned out.

Tonight el V took me to dinner at the Fish Whistle, the C'Town restaurant on the Chester River. Local ingredientys, wine and so on, nice jazz playing, and the up close view of the river running in full tide spate.

Here it is again, Labor Day. I'm not a grad student (though I became one again, more than once, after we married, which didn't happen for several years). I have published books. I have traveled to and lived in strange places. I know wonderful, talented, brilliant people. I spent the day working on a book I'm enthralled by, and getting compensated to do so, right here in C'Town. Who knew it would turn out like this? I, at least, have not a thing to complain about.
 
Damn, I wish I could the software for my Canon to download so I could show you some photos.

OTOH, this romantic album of Nat King Cole at the height of his powers is playing, and we can curl up and listen together in the candle light, and a glass or two of wine.  Did you know that Nat can purr????

The End of Tomato Season Draws Nigh, So, What to Do ....

According to the NY Times, " ... here is the start of the poem “Roma,” by the Oregon poet Matthew Dickman ..."

It is splendid, what tomatoes have the ability to inspire!

Last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened,

you know, the way bodies do
after spending the afternoon having sex
on an old couch while responsible people are suffering
with their clothes on in cubicles and libraries.
He had that look vegetables get
in really nice grocery stores where the tomatoes aren’t just red
they’re goddamn red!

What to do with the tomatoes can be found here.

The bursting bruised purple red of these tomatoes are such a contrast with this morning's sparkling blue sky, which carries not a hint of bruising from history or humanity, er, rather, perhaps, inhumanity?

The Lemay Collection

This is the man whose library has been bequeathed to the Starr Center, and which is being moved into the House, sometime this month.


Among his attributes, Lemay was a Benjamin Franklinologist.

Commentary, Annotation, Basil & Tomatoes

Began today with deadheading the rosebush by my south facing kitchen garden door (there's a matching garden door on the other side). Then I heartlessly snip the newly opened blossomes for the study.  They smell most agreeably.

I'd never read Woodrow Wilson's A History of the American People. What I had read, of course, was the Reconstruction Section of Volume 5.  He was an excellent writer, and a subtle one.  This is popular history -- with an agenda. The narrative is so engaging you don't even notice how quickly you turn the pages. The text is constantly broken by charming black and white vignette illustrations and glossy reproductions of portraits, signatures and other interesting images.  None of these illos and reproductions depict anything cruel, ugly or otherwise disturbing -- nor does the narrative, for that matter.

This week I've been pulling citations from various works of this nature, comparing and contrasting these triumphalist works of our national history with each other, following the revelatory strands of regional conflict among Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas.  There are a couple of other threads I'm teasing out also, equally interesting, and more useful to the Project than the triumphalist celebration of Virginia as the heart and motivator of all that is good and wonderful about the U.S.   But it's too soon to know that.  What matters is that the Project is started, and this beginning also includes writing, right away.  If you wait to start writing until you finish researching you will never write.  So it is better to write right away.

Later this afternoon I'm going to chop up this bouquet of basil.  Most of it will go into an airtight container with olive oil.  Some will go into the tomato sauce I'll make from all these tomatoes.

One way or another this house is going to keep smelling good.

Ah. The garden-yard man is here cutting the lawn. So now there's the smell of new-cut grass too.