Scriblets

Make Mine Sanka

2012-01-31T07:42:00.006-05:00

Somewhere back in the mists of time past hovers an image of me sitting on the brown tiled floor with my dog, Sabre, while parents and friends squabbled at a nearby card table over a game of bridge, a card game that I didn’t understand. I remember my mother saying that she was going to make a pot of coffee and Aunt Sadie calling out, “I can’t have any coffee this late, Annice Loyd, but I’ll take a cup of Sanka?”

Don’t drink Sanka, never did, but it’s a name that has stuck with me over a lifetime. Clearly another of those brand names that advertising engraved into the longterm memory of an impressionable child. Other Sanka memories include the Sunday after church lunches that our family enjoyed at the Piccadilly, which always included passing the tall stack of little orange Sanka packets arrayed beside the coffee urn just before reaching the cashier at the end of the line, a woman with a giant frilly handkerchief artfully folded and draped over one side of her blouse.

Sanka is one of the earliest brands of instant decaffeinated coffee. The story began in Bremen, Germany in 1903 with Dr Ludwig Roselius. Roselius searched for a way to remove caffeine from coffee without diluting the flavorful taste and aroma. With an odd-sounding technique of using brine-soaked coffee beans, he plunged them into the sea during a storm and ended up with beans that reacted differently to roasting. By 1906 he had developed a patented technique that removed ninety-seven percent of the caffeine without removing the flavor. Roselius started a coffee company called Kaffee HAG and introduced his new product in Europe. In France, the brand name became “Sanka,” derived from the French words sans caféine or ‘without caffeine.’ In 1923, Roselius introduced the product in the United States as Sanka coffee, founding the Sanka Coffee Corporation in New York. It was first offered in only two Sanka Coffee Houses in New York, but not long after made available for retail sale. Five years later, General Foods Corporation began distributing Sanka coffee and in 1932, purchased the Sanka Coffee Corporation.

In an intensive American advertising campaign in 1927 Sanka sponsored the Sanka After-Dinner Hour broadcasts heard on Tuesdays on New York’s WEAF. During the 1950s and early 60s Sanka was a sponsor of I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show on CBS television. It was also a sponsor of the The Goldbergs, where on many episodes Mrs Goldberg addressed the camera and speaking directly to the studio audience sang the praises of Sanka coffee. After her sales pitch she walked away from the window, and started the show.

With such promotion, Sanka became a nationwide sales success. The easily recognized bright orange label found its way into coffee shops around the country in the form of the decaf coffee pot. Coffee pots with a bright orange handle are a direct result of the American public’s association of the color orange with Sanka, regardless of the brand of decaf served.

Occasion for Grace

2012-01-30T07:27:00.003-05:00

Editor and director of the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference since 1995, poet Michael Collier has long been an influential member of the writing and teaching community. About teaching poetry he has said, “I think poetry does have this ability to help us deal with things that aren’t black and white and make our thinking more subtle.” Collier is the author of five poetry collections and editor of three anthologies.

He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, studied at Connecticut College and the University of Arizona and has received numerous awards for his poetry, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Thomas Watson Fellowship. From 2001 to 2004 he served as Maryland’s poet laureate. He has taught for many years at the University of Maryland, is married and the father of two sons.

Collier writes his poetry in a studio above the detached garage of a brown shingled home in Catonsville, Maryland. First drafts are hammered out on one of several old garage sale typewriters—a habit from youthful days in Phoenix. In recalling those years the poet says, “I remember very distinctly when writing became more than just keeping a diary and more than just trying to characterize an emotional state. There was a little bit of technological intervention." Collier received an electric typewriter as a graduation gift from his parents, a Royal typewriter and no doubt the result of an uncle working for the company. “Every day I would put a sheet of paper in it, and I would fill it up with words,” says Collier, recalling that he started without any kind of goal other than trying to fill a page every day, subject never important and never going back to revise. “It was the joy of feeling language come out on the page.”

The poem “Robert Wilson” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in August of 1990 and was later included in the 1995 book of poems, The Neighbor. The story in the poem certainly has shades of being created from the poet’s own experience, possibly built upon a recollection of his high school days at Brophy College Preparatory.

ROBERT WILSON

Though he is dead now and his miracle
will do us no good, I must remind myself
of what he gave, plainly,
and without guile, to all of us on the crumbling
flood-gutted bank of the Verde River
as we watched him, the fat boy,
the last one to cross, ford the violent shallows.
And how we provided him the occasion for his grace
tying his black tennis shoes to a bamboo fishing pole
and dangling them, like a simple bait,
out of reach, jerking them higher each time he rose
from his terrified crouch in the middle
of the shin-high rapids churning beneath him,
like an anger he never expressed.
And yet what moved us was not his earnestness
in trying to retrieve his shoes, nor his willingness
to be the butt of our jokes. What moved us
was how the sun struck the gold attendance star
pinned on the pocket flap of his uniform
as he fell head first
into the water and split his face,
a gash he quickly hid with his hands,
though blood leaked through his fingers as he stood
straight in the river and walked deftly toward us
out of the water to his shoes
that lay abandoned at our feet.

From Montana to London

2012-01-29T08:14:00.010-05:00

Montana-born artist Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) ranks as one of the most significant designers of the twentieth century, noted for his avant garde graphic design and poster art. With long years of living in London, connections to the artistic avant-garde in Britain and France put Kauffer at the forefront of developments in the visual language of advertising during the 1930s. Retrospective exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Two airbrush illustrations from the 1930 book, World Polity in 2030; both illustrations show the artist working in the style of vorticism which favored machine-like forms.

A Lithograph titled Cricketer done in 1923

By the age of twenty Kauffer was living in San Francisco and studying art at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute. Through connections at the Art Institute, Professor Joseph McKnight of the University of Utah became aware of Kauffer and his work and chose to sponsor the young artist, paying for further study in Paris. In gratitude, Kauffer took his sponsor’s name as his own middle name.

Flea; Lithograph done in 1926 for the London Underground

Before leaving for Paris Kauffer studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago. While there he attended the much heralded Armory Show which introduced post-modernism to American audiences. The exhibition had a major impact on Kauffer, and many of the same styles showed up in his later career. He arrived in Paris in 1913 and studied at the Académie Moderne until 1914. He moved to London with the start of the World War, and remained there for the next twenty-six years. After only a year in London he had already become an extremely influential designer of posters, theatre costume, exhibition designs, murals, book illustrations, carpets and textiles. He and his wife-to-be Marion Dorn, also a designer, were a dynamic, glamorous couple in London’s art scene.

On the left is a lithograph from 1924 for Eno’s Fruit Salt; the right shows a lithograph for Gilbey’s Invalid Port done in 1933.

Kauffer is perhaps best known for the posters he produced for London Underground, and later London Transport. Those posters span a number of styles: many show abstract influences that include futurism, cubism, and vorticism, while others evoke the impressionist influence of Japanese woodcuts.

One in a series of illustrations done in 1946 for a 2-volume set on Edgar Allan Poe

The Lodger, 1926; tempura on paper

The artist returned to New York City in 1940 and sought work in advertising. He managed a few jobs designing posters for war relief agencies and the United Nations, but the atmosphere of the New York art world at the time was highly competitive and Kauffer struggled until 1947 when he was asked to do a series of posters for American Airlines. The airline continued to be his primary client until his death in 1954.

1931 lithograph, You Can Be Sure of Shell

Hachioji Triangle House

2012-01-28T07:46:00.006-05:00

Smallness is a quality that can be enjoyed. It is also a quality that in architecture can turn into spare beauty on a human scale. Geography has always played some part in Japanese building, with space a constant consideration because of the narrowness of the country, within which large areas are mountainous and unsuitable for building. Japanese architects, especially in modern times have taken this limitation as a challenge and arrived at solutions that turn smallness into highly livable and innovative housing.

The photographs below are from Space: Japanese Design Solutions for Compact Living by Michael Freeman. The house pictured is in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, built on a steep slope right at the limits of practicality in an architectural sense. It is situated on a narrow access road too steep for vehicles, one that also serves several other conventional dwellings. Architects Akira and Andrea Hikone wanted to avoid leveling the ground because of the greater limitations that would impose. They decided to experiment with a shape that would fit the ground rather than fight the slope. They call it a triangular section.

This photograph shows a view of the exterior from the rear looking downhill. The town of Hachioji is downhill on the right.

A double bedroom for the two boys, who enjoy its den-like atmosphere. Several skylights set into the sloping roof make the space bright and airy. Not visible is a glass facade extending up from the ground creating maximum enjoyment of the view overlooking Hachioji.

The living room downstairs faces out through that same double-height glass facade.

A view of the kitchen and dining area looking out onto a back garden

Take a look at another clever use of space in a backyard soy barrel house in Ibaraki, Japan.

Heavy on the Mayo

2012-01-27T07:39:00.005-05:00

As a schoolboy it wasn’t uncommon to return from school hungry and make myself a mayonnaise sandwich, two pieces of Sunbeam white bread slathered with mayonnaise washed down with a glass of milk. These days mayonnaise isn’t a regular ingredient on my plate, but along with mustard, I do keep a bottle in the refrigerator for those times when a visiting friend wants it on a sandwich, or a recipe calls for it. Despite my own take it or leave it attitude, and the so-called war against obesity, America is a country where good and bad cholesterol numbers are tossed about with the same frequency as Kim Kardashian’s problems, and where mayonnaise defies any trend toward healthy eating. As someone said, it’s the glue of salads and celebrations. Whether it’s full strength mayo, fat-free, low-fat, soy-based, organic, trans-fat-free or flavored, supermarkets are stacked with mayonnaise choices, and shoppers are emptying the shelves.

Mayonnaise began its spread around the world in the town of Mahón on the small island of Minorca off the coast of Spain. In its earliest form it was a simple condiment made of raw egg yolk and olive oil which the natives of Mahón called salsa mahonesa in Spanish and maonesa in Catalan. While expelling the British from Minorca in 1756 the French general Armand de Vignerot du Plessis sampled the salsa mahonesa of Mahón and liking it, took the recipe back to France.

French chefs adopted this sauce of Mahón as a high quality condiment and renamed it mahonnaise. By 1823 it was in use in England and had also spread to America where it was viewed as a French sauce difficult to prepare. The invention of an electric mixer solved much of that problem, and it was also made more popular by the spread of inexpensive bottled dressings. Richard Hellman was a German-born delicatessen owner in Manhattan who realized that there was a market for what had by then become mayonnaise. His wife’s recipe for ready-made mayonnaise was already a popular condiment in the deli, even sold in scoops for take out. This popularity led to Hellman selling it in bulk to other stores. He built a factory in 1912 and began producing and selling Hellman’s Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise in one-pound wooden “boats.” A year later he began packaging his mayonnaise in large glass jars. An increase in the popularity of cole slaw as a side dish is closely connected to Hellman’s Mayonnaise. The business was so successful that in 1917 he closed his delicatessen to devote himself full time to the mayonnaise business.

Known as Best Foods west of the Rocky Mountains, Hellman’s is the leading US mayonnaise brand with over fifty percent of the market share. As of September 2010, Hellmann’s accounted for 31.8 percent of the nearly $1.3 billion US mayonnaise market, with total sales of $401,204,800.

Oleg Zhornitskiy is a man who loves his mayonnaise and currently holds the world record for competitive mayonnaise eating—four 32 ounce bowls in eight minutes.

The postcard above is one from 1932 advertising Japanese Kewpie Mayonnaise.

Velveeta & Beer

2012-01-26T07:52:00.003-05:00

A portion of the days around here include an unavoidable wandering between staggered piles of books, an on-purpose arrangement that maintains a desired curiosity about what book is where. Nothing follows alphabet, subject or author. Books are stashed in random places that often end with a Mexican cookbook nestled up to Emily Dickinson. The way I want it, and a system that keeps daily browsing off-balance and unpredictable. The unpredictable on Wednesday was a poem from the usually astonishing ‘gathering’ of Garrison Keillor. I can only imagine that Keillor spends an hour or two each day perusing poetry collections with the aim of finding work that brings the genre another step closer to the average reader, searching for poems that make a daunting form more approachable. Mentioned once before perhaps, but surely deserving of a repeat: Treat yourself to a reading of the Introduction in Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times.

Ronald Wallace is the author of twelve books that include poetry collections, short stories and literary criticism. His latest is the 2008 poetry collection, For a Limited Time Only. He is the founder and co-director of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry and Halls-Bascom Professor of English. He lives on a 40-acre farm in Richland County, Wisconsin.

“Fat of the Land,” the poem below, is taken from Wallace’s 1991 book of poems, The Making of Happiness. It is also found in the Garrison Keillor anthology, Good Poems American Places. Wallace’s poem abounds with words that play off the American penchant for piled plates, large sizes and the effects of it all. From cornucopia to Velveeta to triple chins he paints a picture of ‘one big happy family’ living on the fat of the land and comfortable in their loving likeness and ‘love’s large company.’

THE FAT OF THE LAND

Gathered in the heavy heat of Indiana,

summer and 102°, we’ve come from

all over this great country,

one big happy family, back from

wherever we’ve spread ourselves to thin.

A cornucopia of cousins and uncles, grand-

parents and aunts, nieces and nephews, expanding.

All day we laze on the oily beach;

we eat all the smoke-filled evening:

shrimp dip and crackers,

Velveeta cheese and beer,

handfuls of junk food, vanishing.

We sit at card tables, examining

our pudgy hands, piling in

hot fudge and double chocolate

brownies, strawberry shortcake and cream,

as the lard-ball children

sluice from room to room.

O the loveliness of so much loved flesh,

the litany of split seams and puffed sleeves,

sack dresses and Sansabelt slacks,

dimpled knees and knuckles, the jiggle

of triple chins. O the gladness

that only a family understands,

our fat smiles dancing

as we play our cards right.

Our jovial conversation blooms and booms

in love’s large company, as our sweet

words ripen and split their skins:

mulberry, fabulous, flotation,

phlegmatic, plumbaginous.

Let our large hearts attack us,

our blood run us off the scale.

We’re huge and whole on this simmering night,

battened against the small skinny

futures that must befall all of us,

the gray thin days and the noncaloric dark.

Plastic Pigtails

2012-01-25T07:31:00.002-05:00

Among a gathering of friends and family on a rooftop garden in Tokyo, with strains of “Ave Maria” playing in the background, Tomohiro Shibata and Satoko Inoue exchanged wedding vows—not under the blessing of pastor or priest, but before the flashing eyes and plastic pigtails of I-Fairy, a robot made by Kokoro. For some years now people around the world have been getting married while skydiving, in underwater ceremonies performed in scuba tanks, and in ceremonies with hundreds of bridal couples, but newlyweds Tomohiro and Satoko achieved a first in tying the knot with a robot at the helm.

Once again the innovative Japanese have taken a concept to the next level with the help of technology. First it was the K-LRMCD kiss transmission device for long distance kissing, and now we have another machine performing weddings. Could it happen anywhere else but Japan? The I-Fairy is a four-foot tall wedding robot in the form of a seated, and vaguely feminine humanoid with a head adorned in flowers and ribbons. The feminine aspect is boosted by the robot’s female voice as ‘she’ conducts the service.

The I-Fairy robot’s autonomy is impressive, but in the case of weddings, an engineer out of sight in the wings operates a keyboard to ensure a smooth ceremony. It is pre-programmed with scripted words and actions that it carries out during the service. To date, Kokoro has produced five of the I-Fairy robots and sold two of them.

The wedding couple were a natural choice for electronic nuptials. The groom is an associate professor in the Theoretical Life-Science Lab at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, and his bride is an employee at Kokoro, the company making I-Fairy robots. For her part, Satoko was more than satisfied with the decision to put her wedding in the hands of her company’s android, declaring after the wedding: “This was a lot of fun. Japanese have a strong sense that robots are our friends and hopefully our actions set a precedent for spreading the use of robots in Japanese society.” For his part, Tomohiro said, “It’s true that robots are what brought us together, and as suggested by my wife, we decided that we wanted to try this sort of wedding. It would be nice if the robot were a bit more clever, but she is very good at expressing herself.”

For anyone interested in opening a robot wedding chapel, you can have one of Kokoro’s robots for $81,000.

Norwegian Wood

2012-01-24T07:31:00.003-05:00

Last week in the bookstore I came across a new release of Haruki Murakami’s 1987 groundbreaking novel Norwegian Wood. The book was first translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1989, but in a style intended for Japanese students of English. A second translation in 2000 by Jay Rubin, is now the authorized version for publication outside Japan, Vintage International in the US and Harvill Press in the UK. The new Vintage edition I found last week was released in conjunction with a film adaptation of the book directed by Tran Anh Hung and released in Japan in 2010. The film stars Kenichi Matsuyama, Rinko Kikuchi and Kiko Mizuhara and was nominated for a Golden Lion award at the 67th Venice International Film Festival.

Haruki Murakami, the book’s 63 year-old author is Japan’s superstar of postmodern literature whose publishing numbers continue to shatter records. Since it was first published, Norwegian Wood has sold more than ten million copies in Japan alone, and has further been read by millions of people around the world in more than thirty languages. The book’s success affected the author in unexpected ways. “It became a phenomenon. It wasn’t a book any more. I didn’t want to be famous. I felt betrayed. I lost some of my friends. I don't know why but they left. I was not happy at all.” He reacted by leaving Japan, spending time in Europe and later taking a teaching position at Princeton. He was in his late forties when in 1995 he finally returned to live in Japan.

Norwegian Wood is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of Tokyo in the 1960s. Murakami’s focus is mainly on the bohemian and alienated, those who rejected the conformity and self-sacrifice that contributed to the country’s increased standard of living. To a great extent Norwegian Wood defines the 1960s generation of Japanese—first to enjoy the country’s newly found affluence. The protagonist and narrator is Toru Watanabe, who looks back on his rather melancholy days as a university student living in Tokyo in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when he formed relationships with two very different young women. For readers around the world who’ve never been to Japan, the book offers a detailed view of Tokyo as it was in those days.

During high school, Toru, his friend Kizuki, and Kizuki’s girlfriend Naoko are good friends. Their friendship is interrupted by the suicide of Kizuki on his 17th birthday. Their friend’s death touches both Toru and Naoko deeply and the two spend more and more time together. Eventually their relationship verges on something like love and on the night of Naoko’s 20th birthday, they sleep together for the first time. Shortly after their night together Naoko leaves Toru a letter explaining that she needs some time apart, that she is quitting college to enter a sanatorium near their hometown. After some time has passed and Toru has yet to hear from Naoko, he befriends a girl named Midori, a fellow classmate. Despite the love for Naoko, Toru finds himself attracted to Midori as well. The feeling is mutual and the friendship with Midori grows during Naoko’s absence. In time, Toru visits Naoko in the sanatorium and is moved by his talk with her and knowing her as never before. Something happens that changes Toru and…

Further details of the story I will leave open-ended, unwilling to spoil the story for those interested in reading the book.

For readers unfamiliar with Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood is the perfect choice for sampling Japan’s most popular writer. In this novel Murakami hadn’t yet begun his experiments with magic realism and there are no odd characters or talking cats to figure out and put meaning to. That isn’t to say that the later work incorporating magic realism is anything to steer away from. However Haruki Murakami chooses to tell a story the result is masterful.

Vogue

2012-01-23T07:24:00.002-05:00

Over the years a few Madonna CDs have found their way to my shelves, and memorable among the two or three is the 1990 release, I’m Breathless. It sticks in mind because of one particular song on the album, “Vogue,” which is a standout on the CD, but comes blazing to life in the video made by director David Fincher, in which he (and Madonna) pays homage to several golden era Hollywood actresses. Shot in black and white the style is all 1920s and 30s. It has been ranked as one of the greatest music videos of all time in different critics’ lists and polls, and won three awards at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards out of a total nine nominations.

The song and video release became hugely popular and people in dance clubs everywhere were doing what they called ‘vogueing,’ a graceful style of dance using the hands and arms, struts and model-like poses of angular, linear movements. True enough to say that super pop star Madonna gave a boost to this type of dancing, but it did not originate with her or her concert choreographers. Vogueing is a dance that began with the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1960s.

Originally called “presentation” it later became “performance” and grew out of the dance of Black and Latino Americans in Harlem. The original vogue dancers were flamboyant drag queens in elaborately sequined gowns, strutting and posing like models out of Vogue magazine. Madonna was inspired by vogue dancers and choreographers Jose and Luis Xtravaganza from the Harlem “House Ball.” They introduced “Vogueing” to her at the New York club, Sound Factory. Use of the word ‘house’ to designate the different cliques of vogue dancers grew out of their attraction to the big couture houses like Dior and Saint Laurent. In essence, the dance was a way of imitating the jet set’s beautiful people and front page fashion models.

Jennie Livingston’s award winning 1991 documentary film Paris is Burning documents the origins of this dance movement and Livingston described the dancers as “…people excluded from the mainstream in every way, yet their whole subculture was based on imitating the very people who were excluding them.” It was a gay subculture of grand balls, flashy gowns and couture houses.

Madonna - Vogue by zocomoro

Snap, Snarl, Go to Hell

2012-01-22T07:16:00.003-05:00

Now what could bring a person to act like that?

Not the first post written about HOA problems, and what draws me back to the subject is the realization that uncomplimentary behavior is the identifying mark of too many property owners looking to sound off about their opinions in a tidal wave of recrimination aimed at elected Board members, and anyone else who gets in the way. Not much different from the name calling that characterizes Washington politics.

Since my term of office on the HOA Board of Directors expired, and running for election a second time the last thought in my mind, staying away from Board meetings has been the norm. On a couple of occasions something on the agenda has drawn me back, but only for a portion of the meeting time. A full length HOA meeting no longer fits into the lifestyle I would describe as temperate. Some people enjoy conflict, enjoy trading nasty comments, the gnashing of teeth and the less than circumspect baring of naked emotion. Unfortunately, in the case around here, it continues to be one contingent against another, old Board members trying to force their way of thinking onto new Board members; unelected candidates aggressively trying to find a place on the decision-making panel.

Flush in the middle of a scenic paradise seethes a grumbling and backbiting among people who apparently have little else to do with their time. But no, let me amend that. There are also those who have no idea what’s going on, never read communications from the Manager’s Office and or the Board, and rarely show a face except for the rare appearance at a Board meeting to indulge in some browbeating and goading. These are people Dracula would see coming and turn around to go the other way.

Everyone has an opinion and certainly when conditions allow, it’s satisfying to see policy or plans settled in agreement with your opinion. If things don’t happen to work out in your favor, then why not accept it graciously and hope that the decision you opposed doesn’t turn out bad? Why work behind people’s backs with insinuating email and endless repetition of the bad in settled decisions? What kind of person writes nasty letters, leaves them unsigned and mails them out to the membership?

Thinking about running for the Board of your HOA? I would suggest instead a tall glass of hemlock. It would be less trouble.

Gag Shop Stamps

2012-01-21T07:36:00.004-05:00

Outside of some defunct addresses, you never know what thumbing through an old address book is going to turn up. Looking for a misplaced postcard in a drawer with old letters, I came across a small brown leather notebook that was my address book sometime in the mid-90s. I forgot about the errant postcard and spent the next twenty minutes looking over the old names and addresses. A good many of the people in that brittle old notebook are listed today in another updated book, but a few pages show names I look at now and wonder where they are these days.

The address book has a pocket on the inside cover for tucking slips of paper, namecards or whatever, and halfway looking through the old addresses I felt the thickness of something pushed out of sight in the bottom of the pocket. What I pulled out was a madcap blast from the past, a handful of ‘stamps’ purchased in a Los Angeles gag shop during the time I lived there years ago. Yellowed, stuck together, frayed and torn, the stamps are head shots of totally ordinary and anonymous American faces with weird, funny or outrageous captions below the pictures. Big risk that someone will find these gag stamps offensive, or perhaps insulting to contemporary people with similar looks. It’s my guess that nobody ever intended insult or injury.

Disregarding the captions, something about the faces reminds me of company advertising back in the 1950s, old photos of company sales staff or bank officers the kind sometimes seen printed on calendars or in brochures.

Dreaming Chickens

2012-01-20T08:07:00.004-05:00

A couple of days ago mention was made here of a new book recently brought home. In December of last year Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released a small but beautiful book of “stories” by Lou Beach titled 420 Characters: Stories. The catch is, each of the stories in this book of 176 pages is limited to 420 characters, including letters, spaces and punctuation. They were each written as a status update on the author’s Facebook page.

Facebook status updates and numbers aside, the format of 420 Characters is jet fuel to a longtime personal attraction for a couple of reasons. It started with the discovery of an even shorter format in the style of Japanese haiku, a type of poem impressive for its three lines of seventeen syllables sparsely hinting at an unvoiced thought. There always seems to be more to it, that the reader is being encouraged to participate in filling in blanks toward the creation of a bigger picture. And then Nobel Laureate Kawabata Yasunari produced over the years a collection of stories ultimately called Palm of the Hand Stories. Most of those stories are a page long, the longest no more than three, and like the traditional haiku form, emphasize the power of reduced words in calling the reader to greater participation.

Lou Beach is in the same stream of style. Like the haiku poets he gives himself a goal of pitching a tiny story into its greatest arc within the space of 420 characters. Kirkus Reviews described Beach’s stories as: ‘An adroit experiment that marries linguistic restraint to literary cool.’ Within the small space prescribed, Beach writes about criminals, bimbos, animals, small town girls, divorcées, sentient objects and two dozen others acting out their moments in a mini-world that fronts for something much wider, much deeper. The reader jumps from the surreal to the lyrical, to the puzzling and bizarre, and then suddenly back to chickens who smoke cigarettes. Beach has such color and tone in his tiny palette of possibles that the reader is alternately dazzled, bumped, soothed and then slapped in the face by these stories that take up no more than a third of the page.

Lou Beach is an artist/illustrator, and now with the publication of 420 Characters: Stories, a writer. He passed his early years in Rochester, New York until the 60s led him to California where he has lived ever since, happily married to photographer Issa Sharp, with two children, a dog, a cat, a backyard full of cactus and an orange tree. Asked about himself, Beach says…“I was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, killed me a bear when I was only three. No, wait..I was born in Germany of Polish parents, came to the US when I was only four, spent my youth in Rochester, New York, riding my bike, building snow forts, throwing chestnuts at the kid down the street. I was a fair student, no great shakes, disappointing several teachers by not realizing my “full potential.” Higher education was a two-year community college affair followed by a year of night school at a state university. I did not graduate or learn much (in class).

Below are five of the stories from 420 Characters.

‘The gunnysack hangs from the pommel, full of sparked ore. I let Shorty sip from the stream, long neck arching in the sun. There is a ghost in the cottonwood I sit under to reread your letters. It tries to sniff the pressed flowers you sent from the garden in Boston, but the scent is gone. The petals and paper, envelope, all smell like campfire now.’

•

‘Cheap and gaudy as jellybeans, hard as a jawbreaker. Candy Nelson sat on the bench in front of Jessups Hardware, filing her nails. Discomfited by yet another yeast infection, she crossed and uncrossed her legs, finally just opened them like a book, displaying to the illiterate Luther Choate, driving by, a page from heaven, causing him to lose control of his pickup and run over a red hound that was crossing the road.’

•

‘The nurse left. Ann’s eyes were closed so I dumped her meds into my shirt pocket, snapped it shut. I looked around the room, put her laptop in my backpack. I leaned over to give her a goodbye peck on the forehead. She smelled like her next bath was going to be in the Ganges. Her eyes flew open, she grabbed my wrist and said: “Ronnie, give me a smoke.”’

•

‘FOR-EV-UH. She had it tattooed in a little arc over her left boob, like a military patch. She’d punch me in the arm, punctuate each syllable, leave a blue mark. Told me that’s how long her love would last, shouted it out. After a few months she seemed distant, took off one night for Tulsa with the drummer from a hair band. I went to Skin’N’Ink, asked Mooney if he could make me a tattoo of a bruise, put it up on my arm.’

•

‘“Are you my mommy?” said the little blue egg. “No, dear. You are a plastic trinket full of sweets,” said the brown hen. “My baby is over there,” and she pointed to a pink marshmallow chick being torn apart and devoured by a toddler. The hen screamed and woke up, her pillow wet with sweat, the sheets twisted around her legs. “Christ, I hate that dream.” She reached for a smoke.’

•

420 Characters: Stories is a book that could be on anyone’s ‘Best’ list.

Hairy Little Fingers

2012-01-19T08:06:00.006-05:00

One of the several things missed about Tokyo evenings is going out after work with a couple or three friends to a favorite izakaya. Apparently izakaya restaurants are popping up here and there even in Florida. Sushi bars and karaoke bars are not hard to find anywhere in the US these days, but I wonder if the traditional Japanese izakaya is something that will bridge the gap. An izakaya, a restaurant serving traditional homestyle dishes is identified by an aka-chôchin (red lantern) hanging over the restaurant’s front door and more often than not a noren curtain in the doorway. Passing through the noren, the first sound is a blast of welcome from several employees shouting, “Irasshaimase!” In the next instant the senses are overcome by a cacophony of laughter, shouted orders, a blast of old enka music, a rattle of plates and scrape of chairs. Pretty secretaries and handsome young businessmen red faced with the effects of beer lounge at tables on one side, while a tilting group of older men toast each other with glasses of whiskey nearby. A waiter races past with a plate of nikujaga, a traditional stew of meat, onion, carrots and potatoes. Here comes another with plates of kawa-ebi (river shrimp) and pickled vegetables. The delight of eating in an izakaya is in the discovery of a new taste, a recipe special to that one restaurant and the relish of eating from half a dozen or more small dishes. Grilled smelt here, over there a bowl of chilled tôfu bean curd, octopus with hot green mustard, a platter of raw oysters…

About an hour outside of Tokyo, in the town of Utsunomiya is an izakaya that features two monkeys ‘working’ as waiters. The area around Utsunomiya has its share of mountains and in those mountain live quite a few macaque monkeys. The owner of Kayabuki decided to turn the monkey angle into a theme. At his izakaya two monkeys, Fukuchan and Yacchan, bring hot towels to guests and help out in other small ways. Fukuchan, the female of the pair is dressed up in a woman’s mask and wig and in all truth looks just a little creepy. With encouragement from the master, Fukuchan and Yacchan will deliver bottles of beer, take bills with the money and return with change and perform a few other simple tasks. They are encouraged by the tips they get from customers in the form of edamame (boiled soy beans).

Because I never had the pleasure of eating at Kayabuki, stories of “monkey business” have to be taken as reported. For some customers the cute simian help sometimes crosses the line into bad behavior when the master is occupied elsewhere. One or two diners have complained of being slapped by Fukuchan, nipped on the finger by Yacchan and burglarized by both. Apparently their desires sometimes reach beyond a measly soy bean. But for those who suspect the animals are being mistreated, it may offer some comfort to know that their ‘work’ schedule is monitored and they are allowed only two hours a night on duty.

I love a good izakaya, but don’t fancy monkey fingers in my dinner plate. Color me picky.

Random Book Babble

2012-01-18T07:32:00.003-05:00

Despite the wide open spaces surrounding my four walls here on the edge of America, a familiar closing in kind of mood crept up yesterday, signaling that a few hours escape to Daytona was in order, a drive to help blow away the metaphoric cobwebs. Daily views around home are unfailingly those of distant vistas, panoramic swaths of deep blue and sandy white and people at either at rest or play. Infrequently it’s good to get away from a day of losing oneself in cloud formations and sandy sculptures, to jump into the liveliness of people hustling about their daily work or on errands in crowded shops and streets.

All that is probably just an excuse for me to spend some time in the big Barnes & Noble store in Daytona. I tried a temporary fix the other day by visiting the local Bookland store (a small bookstore owned by Books A Million), but it’s the mini-stop of bookstores and more often than not a waste of time, a useless placebo for book junkies. So it was off to Daytona and the big B&N.

The past two weeks have been a designated re-read period for me, and while keeping up with what’s new on bookstore shelves and in related newsletters, focus has been more on a second look at three books read over the last few years. Not an unusual plan, being one who enjoys returning to a book after a passage of years, this time it was a Julia Glass book from 2002, Three Junes, Haruki Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore (2002) and Edward Rutherfurd’s 2009 historical novel, New York. As it happened, a pre-ordered new release arrived in my mailbox and I squeezed it in between the Murakami and Rutherfurd books; that was Michael Connelly’s latest, The Drop.

Three Junes is a book I would recommend to anyone unreservedly—a fine, fine book. The wonder and skill of Murakami’s latest book 1Q84 is precisely what sent me back to his earlier Kafka on the Shore. Another one to recommend without hesitation. Before the third book on my reread list, I took a couple of days to work my way through the latest Michael Connelly featuring his long established Los Angeles detective, Harry Bosch. Such economic writing from Connelly, not a wasted word or phrase that doesn’t propel his story. Stories about New York, be they old, fictional, historical, contemporary or non-fictional are right down my line. I have always liked the epic books of Edward Rutherfurd and his 2009 book, New York is another historical novel, surpassingly picturesque and studded with fascinating facts concerning the city’s development.

Tuesday in Barnes & Noble was rewarding as usual. There was really only one book on my mind as I entered the store, but you know how that goes. Read the other day on NPR an excerpt of the new Alan Bennett book Smut, and was hoping to lay my hands on that. Took some digging but it was there between two distracting stacks on an out-of-the-way table. On a nearby shelf I came across a book unheard of, unmentioned, or at least in my world; a small 2011 hardback release by Lou Beach titled 420 Characters: Stories. The first thing that caught my eye was a quote from Jonathan Lethem: “Holy sh*t! These are great!” Each of the stories is limited to 420 characters, including letters, spaces and punctuation. Sound familiar? They we're each written as a status update on the author’s Facebook page. One example…

‘The storm came over the ridge, a rocket dropped rain like bees, filled the corral with water and noise. I watched lightning hit the apple trees and thought: “Fritters!” as we packed sandbags against the flood. There was nowhere to go that wasn’t wet, the squall had punched a hole in the cabin roof and the barn was knee-high in mud. We’ll bury Jess later, when the river recedes, before the ground turns hard again.’

That’s it; the end. A haiku-like story that leaves the reader to fill in the blanks.

The last was a totally unexpected find, a new release of Haruki Murakami’s popular 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood. I read this book at the time of it’s first release when I was living in Japan, a time when Murakami was still undiscovered outside of Japan. Since reading 1Q84 I have been thinking again of this and other Murakami books. The new release is in conjunction with the release of a new movie version of the novel. It is a Japanese production, but has been released outside of Japan recently.

The Master Architect’s Home

2012-01-17T07:34:00.011-05:00

Some might call A. Hays Town the premier southern architect of the twentieth century, but while that may be the case, too few outside of architects and Louisiana natives are familiar with the name. My own introduction to Town and his work was boosted by my growing up in Baton Rouge, where the sight of his designs was not rare. I can even add that my father worked at a lumber mill that did the millwork for most Hays Town designs, and my aunt worked for years as his personal secretary. But teenagers have other things on their mind and take little notice of architecture. It is my regret that I never took advantage of proximity to gain better understanding of a major architect. As Cyril E. Vetter writes in The Louisiana Houses of A. Hays Town, ‘Like jazz and jambalaya, Hays Town’s houses contribute to the sui generis nature of Louisiana life.’ The distinct nature of Louisiana life is clear, but I missed a valuable part of it in those youthful years when architecture was overlooked by young eyes mostly interested in fun. Though a couple of weeks late, think of the photographs below as commemoration of the architect’s death in January 2005, age 101.

Mr Town often recommended that clients supplement his design with a dog, preferably a German shepherd.

The photo above shows a view across the front lawn of the A. Hays Town home on Stanford Avenue in Baton Rouge. Since the architect’s death it has been the home of his son, A. Hays Town Jr. Stanford Avenue is located in an old section of Baton Rouge near Louisiana State University, and the house is diagonally across the street from one of two lakes. Not visible in this photograph is the second story located farther toward the back of the house.

In this photograph, looking through a brick arch we see into the backyard and garden. Directly in front is a small outbuilding used as a toolshed. The pigeonnier in the left background serves to evoke an earlier time. The architect added a pigeonnier to a number of his designs, but the homeowners most often used them for storage.

This offers a look at the back patio and a worktable with rocker under the deep gallery. From this view it is easy to see how the architect used native crepe myrtle trees to add twisted lines among the straight lines and angles within the patio.

Through the archway at the end of the patio above are again the irregular branches of crepe myrtle, this time framing another small outbuilding. The walls are made of crisscrossed lath and serve to house a statue. Notice the green algae growing on weathered gray roof shingles—illustration of how Mr Town incorporated the effects of nature into his design.

The photograph here shows two sets of antique doors the architect found while traveling in France. He shipped them home and installed them opposite each other across a hallway.

We see in this photo what the architect called the “morning room” with its window wall providing a sight line to a small statue outside.

Many might consider the study to be the most beautiful room in the house. A note about the artwork: All of the artwork in the house—a quite valuable collection—is carefully guarded by temperature control as well as protection from direct sunlight.

This photograph gives a look into the “Spanish room” which Mr Town added on to the house in the 1970s. He used it primarily as a home office for client meetings.

This offers a glimpse of the formal living room, and very likely a room not often used except on the occasion of parties and other gatherings. There is a formality, unmistakably a beautiful formality, but one that doesn’t encourage relaxed living.

Other views of A. Hays Town designs can be found here, here and here.

The Crunch is the Thing

2012-01-16T07:46:00.004-05:00

In April of last year I remarked in these pages that poet Dorianne Laux has affected me more strongly than any poet I have read in some time. Nine months later that feeling is much the same. Dorianne Laux is a magical poet and continues to be under-appreciated and under-read; she deserves a wider audience. Sunday was a day I decided to reread her latest book of poems published last year, The Book of Men.

As well as this most recent, her work includes Facts About the Moon (2005), Smoke (2000), What We Carry (1994) and Awake (1990). Facts About the Moon was a recipient of the Oregon Book Award and also chosen as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the collection Awake was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. One of Ms Laux’s peers, the poet Tony Hoagland said about her work, “Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion.” Laux lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University. The poem below is from her latest collection, The Book of Men.

Though it does not speak of rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood or sexual love, “A Short History of the Apple” is evidence of the poet’s range.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE APPLE

The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through

living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days. — Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.

Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.

Eve’s knees ground in the dirt

of paradise. Newton watching

gravity happen. The history

of apples in each starry core,

every papery chamber’s bright

bitter seed. Woody stem

an infant tree. William Tell

and his lucky arrow. Orchards

of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.

Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.

Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.

Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.

The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.

Snow White with poison on her lips.

The buried blades of Halloween.

Budding and grafting. John Chapman

in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward

Expansion. Apple pie. American

as. Hard cider. Winter banana.

Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet

by hives of Britain’s honeybees:

white man’s flies. O eat. O eat.

For more poems from The Book of Men look here and here and here.

Nero in Sunglasses

2012-01-15T07:53:00.005-05:00

Like any modern open stadium, glare was a problem for spectators in Rome’s Coliseum back in the day of the Emperor Nero. History tells us that to reduce the sun’s glare Nero watched the gladiator spectacles through “glasses” made of a polished green gem. According to Roman historian Pliny, the gem was emerald, known then as smaragdus and emperor Nero viewed the games by means of a polished smaragdus lens. The word ‘emerald’ comes to us through a corruption of the Latin smaragdus.

Spectacles resembling modern sunglasses were used in China prior to the fifteenth century, kept in place with weights that hung down behind the ears. The quartz lenses in these early glasses were not intended to reduce glare, but rather smoke-tinted especially for Chinese magistrates who wore them to conceal their eye expressions during court proceedings. Later vision-correcting eyeglasses were imported into China from Italy and they too were darkened for judicial use.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yellow-amber and brown-tinted spectacles were prescribed for people with syphilis because sensitivity to light was a symptom of the disease. But the popularity of sunglasses is a phenomenon like so many others, stemming from military research. The Army Air Corp was looking for something to cut high-altitude glare for pilots. Physicists and opticians for Bausch & Lomb developed a dark green tint that absorbed light in the yellow band of the spectrum and not much later the public was able to purchase glasses called Ray-Ban aviator glasses. Foster Grant is the oldest American sunglasses company. Founder Sam Foster sold his first pair of sunglasses at a five-and-dime store on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, but it wasn’t until their 1960s advertising campaign that sunglasses became chic. Foster Grant’s “Sunglasses of the Stars” ad campaign featured Hollywood celebrities like Elke Sommer and Anita Ekberg wearing the glasses, with copy asking, “Isn’t that…behind those Foster Grants?” Well-known fashion designers along with movie stars escalated the craze and by the 1970s Hollywood and the fashion industry were having a huge impact on the sunglasses market.

There was a time in the past when women cultivated an allure with the use of fans or an umbrella tilted over the face. In our day modern women, as well as men do it with sunglasses.

The Seagull

2012-01-14T08:01:00.008-05:00

Friday was a cold day in beachtown, leaving the water and wind-stirred stretches of sand for hardier specimens. A long part of the afternoon was washed in clear sunlight common to colder months along the east coast and I took advantage of it to wander off on a walk. It was one of those times when the sand was clean and hard-packed, easy for walking and free of anything to turn you from a straight line. At first were a couple of gulls standing a good distance apart, an everyday sight of normally social birds having some solitary time away from the colony.

And then there was a huge gathering of them, all facing north at the water’s edge. For reasons beyond me, they suddenly took off in a fluttering cloud, made one low circular swoop out over the water and returned to settle again in the same spot. A moment after touching down every bird was once more stationary in a northward gaze. Gulls are very aware of attention, and when one of us large flightless creatures stops to watch them, they become nervous and edge farther away. Several times in my picture-taking, bird or birds felt threatened by my ‘stare’ and scuttled away.

Where numbers of gulls have gathered for their cryptic rituals at surf’s edge, there is always a scattering of left-behind tokens of their temporary stay, and if luck is on your side, a shed feather untrammeled and still dry makes a delicate and naturally beautiful picture. Too often the harsh setting makes quick work of these dropped plumes, quickly turning them into crusted, splintered leavings denuded of their beauty.

A few more yards down the beach and I came upon a near-perfect set of gull footprints, looking in their webbed shape like two tiny kites waiting for lift-off. Not quite sure how these isolated and static prints are left in the sand, but they appear with no beginning or end, a stamped image telling that one bird stood here looking north.

Whatever we may imagine about the presence of seagulls on a beach, one fact is certain: they are forever and always on the lookout for the next tasty bite of food. And obviously they do pretty well in their established habitat or we wouldn’t see them for long. Eating means eventual defecation, and if you pay any attention to it, seagull excrement is not the unsightly and malodorous discharge common to many land animals. More often than not it is a pure white splash on the sand, with now and then a dark speckle. The best thing about is that it’s gone in the next wash of surf.

Gulls are typically a coastal or inland species, rarely venturing far out to sea. In size they are generally medium to large birds, typically grey or white, often with black markings on the head or wings. They have thick, longish bills and webbed feet. The larger gulls take four years to attain full adult plumage, but two years is typical for smaller birds. Most are ground nesting carnivores, which will eat live food—crabs and small fish—or scavenge opportunistically. Like snakes, gulls have unhinging jaws which allow them to consume large prey. As strange as it sounds, gulls have been observed preying on live whales, landing on the whale as it surfaces to peck out pieces of flesh. Some gulls rely on what scientists call kleptoparasitism, a form of feeding where one animal takes prey from another.

The larger species in particular are resourceful and highly-intelligent birds, demonstrating complex methods of communication and a highly-developed social structure, with typically a harsh wailing or squawking call. They nest in large, densely packed noisy colonies, lay two to three speckled eggs in nests composed of vegetation and the young are born with dark mottled down, are mobile upon hatching and able to feed themselves almost immediately.

Death of a Baseball Cap

2012-01-13T07:36:00.002-05:00

Shouldn’t have put it in the washing machine, but a close look at the battered old baseball cap worn for beach walks told me that it was in bad need of a wash and I thought, 100 percent cotton so why not? Looking a tad grubby and sweat stained, maybe an ounce of sea salt soaked into the cotton, I can’t even remember where the cap came from, or when, but it must have been from a local shop selling beach gear and at the time probably four or five dollars. So, I tossed it in the wash and unknowingly turned it into a clump of useless shredded cotton. An hour later I was looking for a new baseball cap.

Place names or brand names are not a ‘design’ feature I like on shirts, shorts and caps. Plain is fine, but clothing manufacturers today have found a way to make plain more expensive, so most of the time we get stuck with names on our shirts and caps. In a store up the road that specializes in beachwear and equipment I found something like 2,000 baseball caps—all but three of them with NEW SMYRNA BEACH embroidered on the peak. The three exceptions were pink with glitter sparkles. But after all, a baseball cap is a trifling thing not worth anguishing over, and so my new baseball cap carries the name of where I live just like ninety percent of all the other baseball caps on the beach.

The baseball cap as we know it today was first worn by the Brooklyn Excelsiors in the mid 1800s. It became an official part of the baseball uniform on April 24, 1849 when the New York Knickerbockers unveiled their club uniform. In 1860, the Excelsiors wore the ancestor of modern rounded-top baseball caps, and by 1900 the cap with a long visor and a button on top became popular. Modern baseball caps evolved in the 1940s as latex rubber replaced coarse cotton as the stiffening inside the visor. The brim or visor was much shorter and the cap has also become more structured and unlike the floppy style seen in earlier years. By 1954, the New Era Cap Company was producing a uniform cap for each professional baseball team, and today they provide about 2,000 caps per team each season. There are more than 200 styles of Yankees caps, nearly 200 choices for the Dodgers, 175 for the Red Sox.

Good bet that most of us would prefer pink with glitter sparkles to any of the old styles shown above. But retuning to the idea of washing your baseball cap, the suggestion from a young lady in the beach shop was to wash a baseball cap in the dishwasher rather than the washing machine. That never would have occurred to me but then I suppose it is a gentler wash.

Could Have Been a Clock

2012-01-12T07:51:00.004-05:00

English singer-songwriter Nick Drake enjoyed only minor popularity during his short lifetime. He recorded just three albums before his death at age 26: Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1970) and Pink Moon (1972). Drake suffered from depression and insomnia, topics often reflected in his lyrics and on completion of his third album, Pink Moon, he withdrew from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parents’ home in rural Warwickshire northwest of London. Drake died in 1974 from an overdose of a prescribed antidepressant. It was only after his death that people began to better appreciate his music and by the 1990s he had reached cult status. A 1999 television commercial for Volkswagen featured the title track from Drake’s last album Pink Moon, and within a month Drake had sold more records than he had in the previous thirty years.

Robert Kirby, a good friend from their time at Cambridge University described Drake’s lyrics as a “series of extremely vivid, complete observations, almost like a series of epigrammatic proverbs,” though he doubts that Drake saw himself as a poet. In many of his songs Drake used natural symbols like moon and stars, sea and rain, but such language is absent from “One of These Things First” where lyrics are concrete and convey better his sense of regret for what didn’t turn out. Nick Drake may not have seen himself as a poet, but there is something very close to that in his lyrics.

The song “One of These Things First” from the second album, Bryter Layter is featured on the 2004 Grammy Award winning soundtrack, Garden State. It was also used in the 2008 film Seven Pounds starring Will Smith.

ONE OF THESE THINGS FIRST

I could have been a sailor, could have been a cook

A real live lover, could have been a book.

I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock

As simple as a kettle, steady as a rock

I could be

Here and now

I would be, I should be

But how?

I could have been

One of these things first

I could have been

One of these things first.

I could have been your pillar, could have been your door

I could have stayed beside you, could have stayed for more.

Could have been your statue, could have been your friend,

A whole long lifetime could have been the end

I could be yours so true

I would be, I should be through and through.

I could have been

One of these things first

I could have been

One of these things first.

I could have been a whistle, could have been a flute

A real live giver, could have been a boot.

I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock

As simple as a kettle steady as a rock.

I could even be here

I would be, I should be so near

I could have been

One of these things first

I could have been

One of these things first.

From Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left is a beautifully written and arranged song, “River Man.”

RIVER MAN

Betty came by on her way

Said she had a word to say

About things today

And fallen leaves.

Said she hadn’t heard the news

Hadn’t had the time to choose

A way to lose

But she believes.

Going to see the river man

Going to tell him all I can

About the plan

For lilac time.

If he tells me all he knows

About the way his river flows

And all night shows

In summertime.

Betty said she prayed today

For the sky to blow away

Or maybe stay

She wasn’t sure.

For when she thought of summer rain

Calling for her mind again

She lost the pain

And stayed for more.

Going to see the river man

Going to tell him all I can

About the ban

On feeling free.

If he tells me all he knows

About the way his river flows

I don’t suppose

It’s meant for me.

Oh, how they come and go

A Brief Encounter

2012-01-11T07:48:00.004-05:00

A few brittle moments on Saturday…

In weekly trips to the public library there is something of a pattern to my visits, and a big part of that is the time spent looking through the large cart of donated books just inside the door. The books are not meant to be snatched up and freely taken without a word to library personnel, and there is a procedure to follow—quite simple—in the case of a desired book from the cart. I’ve done it at least a dozen times.

The donated book program is managed by a group of volunteers called Friends of the Library. The aim is not to make a great deal of money for the library, but to add marginal financial support to library programs and to offer a service to readers and book lovers. Most books, unless newly released hardbacks by well known authors, are priced between one and two dollars. I once paid $3.30 for a new first edition hardback release by Barbara Kingsolver, the most I’ve ever paid. This time it was a 2005 Penguin Classics paperback of Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, suggested bookstore price $16.00.

Familiar with the procedure, I took the Hans Christian Andersen book over to the reference librarian’s desk and explained that I was interested in purchasing a book picked from the donations cart. I wasn’t sure how it would work this time, whether they would allow me to buy it immediately, or after processing in two or three days time. Either way was fine. This time the librarian on duty said the book would be processed, priced, then placed on the shelves in the small book sale room. Mmm…news to me.

“May I write my name and telephone number on a slip of paper to put on the book indicating my interest?”

“Yes, that would be all right, though I’m not sure they will call you.”

“Really? They’ve done so on one or two other occasions.”

A shrug.

“I’m going to ask on the note that in processing the book they please not mark the price on the front cover with a grease pencil, but write it on this paper instead.”

“No, that’s the system. That’s how they price mark the books.”

“Well, marking the cover devalues the book and writing the price on this slip of paper is not too difficult.”

“Yes, well that’s the system.”

Having received no phone call by Tuesday, I stopped at the reference librarian’s desk to inquire. A different librarian was on duty this time and after hearing my request, promptly located the book on a nearby shelf. A price of $3.50 was written on the slip of paper with my name and number. The librarian took one look and said, “That’s too much. It should be $1.10.” And that’s what I paid for a clean copy in fine condition.

Each of the thirty fairy tales in this collection is preceded by an illustration. The example above is from the story, “The Tinderbox,” one of the writer’s early tales, first published in 1835. Unknown to many is Andersen’s artistic abilities, and that in his early years he considered focusing entirely on art. One of his talents was making paper cut-out figures of characters from the folk tales of his childhood. Thirty of those paper cut-outs are reproduced in this edition of Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales.

Something for the Baby’s Butt

2012-01-10T08:10:00.004-05:00

Once in a while when looking through the medicine cabinet for a tube of Neosporin or a Band-Aid, thoughts go back to childhood and some of the strange remedies and ointments our mother liked to keep in the house. Many of them are no longer around and today have an old-timey ring with names like Campho Phenique, Sal Hepatica, BC Powder and Hadacol. Most of them I was never subjected to and to this day don’t know what half of them did in the way of healing. One remedy that was always around and applied with abandon was Vaseline, still around today and still popular.

Robert Chesebrough was a young man with a kerosene business in Brooklyn around the time of an oil boom in Pennsylvania. In the early 1850s kerosene was a major source of power for both home and industry but the business was threatened by cheaper petroleum fuel coming out of the Pennsylvania oil wells. In 1859 Chesebrough traveled to Pennsylvania to have a look at this new fuel. Touring the oil fields, he stood nearby and watched a rigger scraping a thick gooey substance from a drilling rod. A chemist at heart, Chesebrough asked about the nasty-looking goo and was told that it was a bothersome gunk that came up with the crude oil and collected on rods and joints. Left alone it tended to clog up the equipment. No one had any real idea what the stuff was, but many of the workers slathered it on burns and cuts, claiming it accelerated healing. That bit of information brought a light to the young man’s eyes and he returned to Brooklyn with several jars of what the roughnecks called “rod wax.”

Chesebrough spent months experimenting with the mysterious gunk or jelly. His aim was to extract and purify the waste product’s essential ingredient. At the end of it all he came up with a clear, smooth substance he called “petroleum jelly.” Like a character out of Frankenstein movies, he experimented by inflicting on himself cuts minor and major, burns and scratches. As painful and risky as it might have been, Chesebrough discovered that cuts and burns covered with his petroleum jelly healed quickly and without any infection. It took ten years but by 1870 he was manufacturing Vaseline Petroleum Jelly.

There are two sides to where the name “Vaseline” came from. One is that Chesebrough concocted it from the practice of using his wife’s flower vases as laboratory beakers, then appending the popular medical suffix “-line.” Another story claims that the name is more scientific and was derived from the German word wasser for ‘water’ and the Greek elaion for ‘olive oil.’

To promote his product, Chesebrough traveled around New York handing out free jars of the ointment, encouraging people to use it on cuts and burns. Within six months he had twelve horse and buggy salesmen traveling about selling his Vaseline for a penny an ounce. Soon, people were reporting that the jelly removed stains from wood furniture and added life to leather goods. Farmers found that a liberal coating of Vaseline prevented machinery from rusting. By 1900 Vaseline Petroleum Jelly had become a staple in medicine cabinets. By 1912 it was a million-dollar industry for the former kerosene salesman.

Among its non-medical uses, Vaseline is used to coat the feet of vending machines to keep pests out. People also put it on chickens to prevent frostbite, long distance swimmers coat their bodies in Vaseline, skiers coat their faces and baseball players rub it into their gloves. But perhaps strangest of all was the custom followed by its founder. From the earliest days of his experimentation, Robert Chesebrough never missed eating a daily spoonful of Vaseline. He also instructed the nurse during an attack of pleurisy to give him whole-body rubdowns with Vaseline. And he lived to the ripe old age of ninety-six!

Scorpions, Cat’s Paw & Drumsticks

2012-01-09T07:37:00.006-05:00

Usually satisfied with the occasional odd bit of news from Japan, on Sunday my thoughts went tripping off to China, led by a snatch of quirky tabloid reporting from the backroads of beyond. One link led to another and for a while I bounced from restaurants to babies to creepy crawlies and back again to food and restaurants. Really, some of the tidbits below are not offbeat by any means, merely facts about China not always right out front in the news.

There are more CELL PHONES in China than there are PEOPLE in the US—twice as many, to be exact. In late August, Reuters reported that there were 794.7 million cell phone subscribers in China, a number almost 2.5 times the size of the entire US population. Yet, cell phone subscribers make up only 61 percent of the country’s total population. China Mobile is the world’s largest cellular service provider, with a total of 558.9 million subscribers.

China is packed with Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. In 2009 Yum! Brands, an American company that owns Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s, A&W and WingStreet opened more than 500 new restaurants in China. KFC is the big winner with over 3,000 restaurants currently on the mainland. Yum! claims that it opens nearly one new KFC in mainland China every day. In China, McDonald’s lags far behind Colonel Sanders and his crispy chicken.

Restaurants in Guangdong Province are well known for serving dishes of exotic creatures like snakes, insects and cats. Earlier this week three gentlemen sat and discussed their business over a Chinese delicacy, a dish of boiled cat meat stew and herbs. One of the businessmen was 49 year-old billionaire Long Liyuan. He unfortunately didn’t survive to rehash what transpired at the meeting as he was murdered in cold blood by his business partners. Police described it as a well planned and executed murder, the other two businessmen having laced the pot of stew with dangerous herbs. All three of the men ‘enjoyed’ the stew, but the billionaire consumed more than his two business partners. All three became ill, but with double portions, Long Liyuan didn’t make it.

Over 75 percent of the Chinese population supports the government’s “one-child” policy. Even though its workforce has been able to produce stunning results over the past two decades, the Chinese government seeks to restrict population growth through the one-child policy. This prohibits many Chinese families from having more than one child. Though it sounds oppressive, according to a study by the Pew Research Center the policy is supported by a large majority of the Chinese population…

…With the aid of fertility drugs a young ‘Octomom’ in China has become the proud mother of eight beautiful newborns. The case is raising quite a few eyebrows with authorities not only because of the fertility drugs used, but the use as well of two surrogate mothers. In a country where one child is the norm and the law, many Chinese are shocked that the couple spent approximately $160,000 to have the eight children. Much of the outrage is directed at the split between the wealthy, who can afford such a procedure and seemingly do as they please, and the middle and lower classes. However, the case has also drawn attention to strict laws concerning family planning and birth. Despite legal problems, the ELEVEN nannies hired by the parents are having a good time with the eight babies.

Residents of an apartment complex in Shenzen, China, an area bordering Hong Kong, woke to find hundreds of scorpions invading their homes and covering their floors. In the case of one hysterical tenant, a scorpion crawling over his body awakened him. When he turned on the light, he found many, many more, creeping and crawling all over his bedroom and bedclothes. Tenants of the building believe that a real estate developer pushing for forced evictions is behind the invasion of over 100 POUNDS of living, stinging scorpions. Residents reported that a man carrying a large bucket was seen walking from the building’s development office and dumping the contents into open apartment windows. The company is trying to evict residents in favor of a more profitable construction project. Denying the allegations, the company says their deal was sealed with the construction company and there is no need to force evictions. The apartments in question are slated for demolition, but homeowners have not yet signed any papers as they are awaiting compensation settlements. Police and residents spent twenty-four hours hunting down the scorpions and removing them from homes.

More Diego Rivera

2012-01-08T07:01:00.006-05:00

Mexican painter Diego Rivera was a hugely passionate man who more than anyone illustrated for his countrymen the beauty of Latin American traditions and culture, particularly that of his homeland. Rivera was as much a revolutionary as he was artist and from the age of sixteen until his death, his life was an ongoing challenge to political bastions. Expelled from art school for his revolutionary ways, he joined the Communist party but found himself driven out for combative ideologies, in his painting he battled with patrons, at times seeing portions of his murals painted over for their Marxist leanings. It was a passionate life of chaos in all walks, fighting with the church, with his women, and frequently weathering scandals. But through it all he painted with the head, heart and hands of a genius.

Self Portrait (1941); oil on canvas

The art of this man has drawn me back again and again with work as fresh on a tenth viewing as it was the first. As recently as last week an example of his work was featured here as part of work done by Latin American artists, and last April a post devoted to Rivera titled “Appetite for Life” included five of his paintings. I can’t seem to get enough.

Born in 1886, the artist spent many years of his life abroad studying and practicing his art. He went to Spain at twenty-one, moving on to France, Belgium, Holland and England. He returned to Mexico but soon left again for Paris. In 1919 he travelled to Italy but was back in Mexico by 1921. His work was in demand and he received a number of commissions to paint frescoes and murals in foreign cities. His one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York broke all attendance records. He died in 1957 in Mexico City.

The above photo is of Rivera’s Fountain of the Aztec Rain God Tlaloc, a tiled fountain constructed between 1950-52 in Mexico City that is still a part of the municipal water system. Basically a shallow pool more than a hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, it originally served as the ceremonial entry point for water from the Lerma River into the city’s main reservoirs. The flow of water has been diverted into a pipe, but in Rivera’s sculpture, the rain god Tlaloc, still lies on his back in the pool. In the beginning water came through Tlaloc’s face, under his mouth, and on into the Carcamo, a giant tank inside the rotunda, part of the same complex. Until the 1990s, municipal water flowed into the tank, and from here technicians could control the levels in several large reservoirs. Rivera painted the entire cement tank, including the floor, in elaborate, colorful scenes.

Portrait of a Woman (1944); oil on canvas

Portrait of Oscar Miestchaninoff (1913) oil on canvas, painted during the artist’s cubist period

Sleep (1932); lithograph

New York New York

2012-01-07T08:02:00.012-05:00

‘The basic fact of modern civilization is the city. Wherever we may live, city influences surround us. Even in rural areas, city ways and city preoccupations have to a great extent displaced traditional habits and interests. Whether we love the city or are repelled by it, our homes and our clothes, our forms of entertainment and our jobs, our political attitudes and our powers of social behavior, all directly or indirectly reflect the influence of urban modes and urban methods. For the city is the most dramatic and compelling expression of the creative energies released by the interaction of democracy and industrialism, the twin forces which are reshaping our world. There is no corner of any land, no island in the sea, where the shadow of the city’s towers does not fall. There is no human being anywhere who is exempt from the agony and triumph, the despair and aspiration, out of which those towers spring.’ — from the preface of The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (1953) by John A. Kouwenhoven

Packing, shifting, sorting and trying to make sense of moving a household to new ground, good friends uncovered from under a lamp on top of a wardrobe last week a long forgotten book. The first thought must have been, “What in the heck was this doing up there? I thought we had lost this book.” Fortunate indeed it was not lost, and more fortune in the fact that it hadn’t suffered much wear and tear or exposure to sunlight. I say that because the book is not an old dogeared and valueless reprint of Danielle Steele, but rather a 1953 first edition of The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York by John A. Kouwenhoven. And it is a truly matchless compilation of drawings and photographs covering 300 years of the city’s growth. My friends were kind enough to allow me some time to peruse the book and make some scans of a few representative photographs. Special treat for a book lover. Below are some examples…

1953 first edition of The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York by John A. Kouwenhoven

Row of houses on State Street facing Battery Park (1864); at the time of the photograph all were occupied by army offices.

Back porch of 436 West 27th Street about 1872; the house was built around 1825, the longtime residence of actor, Edwin Forrest. At the time of the photograph it was owned by the Drummond family shown gathered on the steps.

Hester Street looking west from Clinton Street toward the Bowery; taken in 1888, the photograph is of the area commonly called the Pig Market, the principal shopping district of the most crowded slum district in the city. The left background shows a short stretch of the old elevated railway.

These two photos show construction of the Times building. The left was taken in 1902 from below 43rd Street looking north across the triangular plot between Broadway (right) and Seventh Avenue (left). The right photograph was taken in 1904, looking south along Broadway from 44th Street. The steel frame of the Times building is already being covered with its sheath of terracotta and pink granite.

From a series of Ellis Island photographs of immigrants taken in 1905

A 1906 photograph of the Flatiron Building, designed by D.H. Burnham & Co. and erected in 1901-02; the building was for several years the world’s most famous skyscraper. The photograph here is by Edward Steichen.

Gerrit A. Beneker’s 1911 drawing, A Drink of Water; steelworkers who built the city’s great bridges and skyscrapers were romantic symbols of the constructive energies shaping the modern metropolis. The bridge under construction in the drawing is the Manhattan Bridge opened in 1909. In the background is the Brooklyn Bridge and the tower of the Singer Building.

This photograph by the well-known Walker Evans was taken in 1932 and is titled South Street, New York.

A wide-angle photograph from about 1940, looking straight up from the lower plaza of Rockefeller Center, site of a skating rink in winter, and in summer outdoor dining.

Post-It

2012-01-06T08:00:00.004-05:00

Shopping is not one of my favorite pastimes, even the holiday cheer of Christmas failing to make it much better. Just rather be doing something else. But like a few million others, it couldn’t be put off any longer and so several days before Christmas I wandered into a small giftshop downtown looking for a couple of gifts. Someone had told me this particular store carried a hand cream that I knew was on a certain Sister Woman’s wish list. Five minutes after walking through the door I had already chosen an armful of presents-to-be, and still not satisfied stayed almost an hour just to look at the miscellany of unconventional, eccentric and unexpected inventory on their shelves.

Leaving the store later, among those items in the bag of intended Christmas gifts was one small stocking stuffer intended to go no farther than home, a duplicate of one aimed for a friend back in the Cajun country of Louisiana, the perfect choice for her, but no less for myself as well.

Good guess that post-it notes are something that countless people find not only useful, but downright necessary in the traffic of daily life. Their usefulness is no different in my case. Always in the past, the choices were a boring pale yellow, or a gaudy set of aqua, orange, lime green and purple.

Cavallini does it a little bit differently with subdued colors, blank, lined, graphed and bordered post-it notes, even with a type heading.

Cavallini & Co. is located in San Francisco and offers super-cool calendars, notebooks, gift tags, wrapping paper, tape, postcards and assortments of other beautifully designed stationery goods. They offer online shopping and also suggest other stores where their products are available. Click on the Cavallini link above and check out their product line. Christmas has passed but there are no doubt birthdays and other occasions that call for a small, reasonably priced gift. You could do worse.

This photo shows the Sticky Notes with a few other favorite items from other places: the cardboard Marble Candy cylinder that doubles as a pen case, the ever present Life notebook, a Montblanc Marcel Proust commemorative fountain pen, a newly found seaheart (sea-bean) and a strip of colorful new stamps.

Donuts & Ethel Rosenberg

2012-01-05T07:57:00.004-05:00

Another cold day in beachtown, just right for sitting at a sun-filled window with a good book. But before anything else I tested the air with a little outdoor breakfast in my big patio chair overlooking the blue. Enjoyed some time of wandering the beach near-stifled in the bulk of sweater, hoodie and scarf then returned to the warmth of indoors and a bright window of slanting light. I keep an ever-growing file on the iMac of poems that I like, and though not always the case, on many occasions poems discovered on The Writer’s Almanac end up on that list of favorites. Let no one doubt Garrison Keillor’s eye for poetry. For those unfamiliar with it, his introduction to Good Poems for Hard Times is a classic for anyone desiring an everyman’s approach to poetry. Should be required reading in classes starting with Poetry 101 and going right up to graduate seminars.

In my list of favorite poems from The Writer’s Almanac is one by Michael Heffernan, a fine example from a March 2011 edition of TWA. A Detroit native, Heffernan has taught since 1986 in the MFA writing program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. His ninth book of poetry, At the Bureau of Divine Music was published last March. Heffernan has won three NEA grants, and two Pushcarts, along with the Iowa Poetry Prize. This latest collection of poems combines meditations on the ordinary happenings of daily life with thoughts on the passing of years, on love and infidelity, and on remembrance and regret.

From that book, “The Art of Self-Defense” shows us the poet looking back to a time in his Detroit youth in 1953. The ending, which comes in six short, staccato-like sentences suggests that the thoughts, memories and feelings in the poem are crucial, possibly moments that shaped the poet’s growth.

THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE

Another day’s stint in the free world
begins here in the donut shop. Standing in line
wondering how many cheese Danish and apple fritters
as well as donuts I should buy, while the creamy girls
in their summer dresses are licking their profiteroles,
I see myself as a boy in the summer of 1953
salting sliced tomatoes with my grandfather
in the white shirt he wore. The kitchen was big and sweet.
The breeze from the electric fan swung by us and away.
The oilcloth on the table was cool and slick.
The leaves of the tree of heaven dappled the sill.
In line in the donut shop is a man in a straw hat
between a woman in pigtails and a boy with large eyes.
Gramps was a boxer in his younger days, semiprofessional.
He watched the Wednesday night fights on our TV.
In his last autumn he taught me to box.
He set up punching bags in his basement.
He taped newspapers to the windows. He named me Spike.
He got me to shadowbox next to the coal bin.
He kept me at it hard till it felt like forever.
When the time came, he arranged a bout
with Mike Donnelly from down the street.
Mike struck the top of my head at once and down I came.
He helped me up from the floor and went home.
I was eleven. I wasn’t fast or clever. This was the autumn
after the summer they fried the Rosenbergs.
Gramps walked me down to the corner to get the Free Press.
The photograph showed their bodies on the front page.
He tugged my hand and kept me from seeing it.
We mark these solitudes throughout our lives.
This is not simply about things as they are.
This is about donuts, profiteroles, and straw hats.
Things cannot be as they are in this country.

Cold Crabs

2012-01-04T07:21:00.005-05:00

Tuesday is a day when only the most devoted venture out to the windy cold interface where ocean meets land. Looking north and south, the beach is an empty stretch, deserted by even the birds. One or two gulls, a small scatter of ruddy turnstones, only the hungriest among their flocks have come to the water’s edge. Whether it is the cold or otherwise, the pelicans are nowhere in sight. With the sun at its highest pitch, the temperature climbs a feeble degree or two, but the wind chill is doing its part and 38° F becomes 34°. Weathermen describe cold fronts and blasts of wind from Canada, advising locals to either bring plants indoors or wrap them before nightfall with its promise of 29°.

For the first time in memory I prepare for a walk on the beach with three layers and a wooly scarf tied snuggly around the neck. And that does the trick, but then why had I not considered gloves before leaving home? Barely a minute of southerly walking and fingers start to stiffen with cold. Fortunately, sleeves stretch enough to cover all but the fingertips, but do little for the icy blow in my face, sure to bring an ache over any distance.

The cold loneliness of the beach is a welcome sight after the holidays, when weather was warmer and attracted crowds with fireworks and leave-behind litter. Daily trash wagons do a good job there, but can’t be expected to stop for the hundreds of expended bottle rockets and dead flying spinners, or the scrap of countless exploded dragon tails. Here and there along the beach are small bits of colored paper that served as either wrapping or stuffing for the pink and green aerial displays that lit up the nighttime sand and surf last weekend.

Over the course of two miles I pass not another person and see none in the distance north or south. The sand is wrinkled by no other footprints but my own, a solitary walker passing among seashells, dead crabs and a clump or two of tangled wrack. Many would call this the best time, perhaps wishing for less aching cold, but relishing the undisturbed elements weaving their patterns.

Here is one large crab that seems to have been caught in the wind driven sand and molded into a deadly bas-relief. The gradation of color on its shell is one more marvel of the ocean come to land. Two eyes like shiny black BBs poke from the serrated edge of curved shell and for a moment suggest the crab is still alive. But the cracked shell tells another story.

There is another crab, one long dead and diminished by the scavenging of other life forms, but in some way still beautiful with its intricacy of stilled legs and claws.

The next encounter is with a third crab, this one aloof in its unlovely and threatening stance, a dull shape and color scheme that describes an ugly duckling of the crab world. The threat is impotent since it is one more dead crab having breathed its last in a ready-to-strike pose.

Back in the warmth of home, the outside cold has done its work and I’m left to deal with an ache that thrums inside my windblown head. However, that will pass and leave no regrets about my hour with the cold wind and dead crabs.

The Spare Palette

2012-01-03T08:07:00.005-05:00

Feeling once more the pull of black and white art, a spare palette that in the hands of talented artists doubles the sense of drama, I pulled down again a book introduced here last July, Portrait of Latin America As Seen by her Print Makers. Turning unhurriedly through these monochrome plates, it is soon apparent that the work moves from primitive to folk art to fine art. Clear as well that the subjects evoke a world of rural Latin America far from our notions of modern life. One page offers a portrait of hungry peasants, another a picture of men at work, or family members entwined in embrace, and another the lined face in close-up of a village elder, a microcosm of life among people of the earth, people for whom family is life.

The three plates here each illustrate a different facet of rustic life as it is lived and completed in places far away from world capitals. The first, a work titled only Grabado (Engraving) is a portrait of grief in the face of death who has taken away a loved one. The second, by Mexico’s greatest artist portrays a family expressing gratitude for the fruits of their labor. The last print is one expressing the camaraderie of Uruguayan gauchos at the start of a long day.

Engraving by Pompeyo Audivert; wood engraving (1944)

Audivert was born in Spain in 1900, emigrating to Argentina at the age of eleven. He became a naturalized Argentinian in 1916. A painter and graphic artist, he belonged to a group of progressive artists known as “The New Generation.” He died in 1977.

Fruits of Labor by Diego Rivera; lithograph (1932)

Born in 1886, Rivera is perhaps the most well-known of Mexican artists. His work is in museums all over the world and his frescoes and murals are painted in and on numerous buildings, 300 of them in Mexico alone. An active communist, Rivera was perhaps as famous for his politics as his art. He died in 1957.

Discussing Horse Breaking by Carlos González; woodcut (1941)

Born in 1905 and raised on the treeless plains of Uruguay, González studied for a time at The School of Plastic Arts, but disagreed with his professors and returned to the country. He was a painter, muralist and graphic artist.

What Makes a Day

2012-01-02T07:38:00.004-05:00

Favorite lists are usually things we see near the end of December. Half a dozen or more came under my eyes during that time but it never occurred to me to gather up a few favorites of my own. Until today. Tramping down the beach on New Year’s morning an idea popped up to recall a few things that added something extra to the year just passed. Thinking more about it, I decided to put it all in five categories of gadgets, ink, fountain pens, books and blogs. So, without a lot of talk let’s get to the memorable bonuses of last year.

GADGETS

iPhone 4S: There was a time I strongly disliked cell phones, thinking of them as something like the devil’s spawn. About a year after the release of the first iPhone I almost grudgingly decided to get one, mostly because I couldn’t stand not having the latest toy from Apple. That turned out to be a moderate disappointment, but one that at least included a couple of great and convenient functions. Then came the iPhone 4S and my whole way of thinking about cell phones changed. This is an incredible handful of do-almost-anything technology that I applaud more than any other Apple product to date.

iPad 2: Best of all the tablet computers, beautiful, full of potential, cool and classy and last but not least, heavy. The truth is, it sits sleeping on my desk most of time waiting to be used. Naive on my part, but I bought the iPad thinking it was going to come out of the box doing everything I’d seen on TV commercials. Better be prepared to spend a handful of money on extra apps if that’s what you want. Another out of the park homerun from Apple, but mostly wasted on me.

INK

One of those who believes there can never be enough fountain pen ink, 2011 brought four colors I especially like. I say ‘colors’ because in this case that alone is the basis of my choosing the inks below. You can buy them at Goulet Pens.

1. Diamine Denim

2. Sailor Tokiwamatsu

3. Noodler’s Lexington Gray

4. Noodler’s Blue Nose Bear

FOUNTAIN PENS

1. Pelikan Souverän 600 — A perennial favorite that never ever fails, no matter the choice of ink.

2. TWSBI Diamond 530 — Big surprise; China gets into the game with a five-star standout pen.

BOOKS

Poetry: Dorianne Laux, The Book of Men—includes the impressive “Homicide Detective: A Film Noir”

Short Stories: Bruce McHart, The Outlaw Album—a singular voice; don’t overlook McHart.

Non-Fiction: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs—an eye-opener about a rude and obnoxious visionary.

Cookbook: John Folse, The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine—History, Photographs & Recipes

Novels:

1. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84—another notch on the road to a Nobel Prize

2. Stephen King, 11/22/63—Don’t make the mistake of underestimating a very good writer.

3. Don Winslow, The Gentlemen’s Hour—Winslow is back on top, back in form; best since Savages.

4. James Lee Burke, Feast Day of Fools—Burke is simply one of the best; writes like a damaged angel.

5. Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2004)—Move over Michael Chabon. Read Jonathan Lethem!

BLOGS

1. Bus Stories: Observations on Life in Transit—a good writer with a sharp eye and piercing wit

2. A Reader’s Life—plain, unadorned happenings and observations in the life of an interesting writer

3. Palimpsest—a literate and well-researched collection of thoughts on pens, ink and pencils

From the Dragon’s Mouth

2012-01-01T15:55:00.004-05:00

A year has passed in this strange place of scenic wonder now called home. Some will wonder why I dub the place strange, but in this case it is a comparative word meaning Florida has still not become a ‘home’ that fits snugly around a lifestyle long accustomed to Japanese ways. Call it a work in progress. By any name it’s a life, at times both high and low with blessings to be thankful for. I tell myself that each time sky, water and sand color a morning walk.

2011 was a good year for Scriblets and my appreciation goes to those readers who found a few minutes each week to tune in and see where the drift has taken me. Daily subjects have wandered far and wide of the original thought to focus mainly on fountain pens, ink and paper, and I explain that by citing the move from Tokyo—a veritable garden of delights for pens and such—to a small town where throwaway ballpoints are king and anything but blue ink is radical. Still an enthusiast for these things, posts on pens and ink will always find an occasional place in the line up.

In the Chinese (and Japanese) calendar, 2012 is the Year of the Dragon. During my time of living in Japan sending out New Year greeting cards was a custom I embraced from the start. The last few weeks of each December were always a time for planning a card design suitable to whatever animal was next in the cycle of twelve. Hard to do that here for several reasons, distance mainly. The card below is little more than a facsimile of the real thing and not anything sent to friends in the mail. Still, my hope is genuine that all will enjoy the harvests of a bumper year—Happy 2012 to all.

Prior to 2012, the last Year of the Dragon was in 2000. The card I made that year is shown below.

Love Unflinching

2011-12-31T07:48:00.004-05:00

Some time back I came across two old volumes of Rudyard Kipling in a used bookstore, a pair of 1956 book club editions of Kipling: A Selection of His Stories and Poems, compiled by John Beecroft. The books include a first-rate selection and offer ideal introduction to a writer Somerset Maugham praised as “…our greatest story writer. I can’t believe he will ever be equalled. I am sure he can never be excelled.” Apart from Kipling scholars, it’s doubtful that very many would settle down to read these collections front to back, but they are just right for passing an hour sampling an exotic flavor rarely found in modern writers.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (Mumbai), India in 1865. Shortly before his sixth birthday, the young Kipling was taken to England and boarded with a family who unexpectedly treated him badly. He stayed there for several unhappy years until his mother enrolled him in a Devonshire boarding school, which turned out to be a joyous span of years for the young Rudyard. At seventeen he returned to India and a newspaper job in Lahore. He had begun writing in school and the newspaper provided a convenient outlet for many of his sketches, tales and poems. After seven years in India, Kipling left for England by way of America.

Kipling’s stories had made his name known in London before his arrival, but it was the story “Without Benefit of Clergy” written while in London that assured his income. Despite his birth in India and the years in London, the writer developed close ties with two or three Americans and many of the influences on his writing came from American authors—Emerson, Poe, Bret Harte and Mark Twain. His marriage to the sister of an American friend was no surprise. The couple went to Vermont where Kipling did some of his finest writing. Returning to England with his wife and two daughters after four years in America, he wrote prolifically until his death at seventy-one.

On Friday I came across a poem in the second volume of the Kipling books titled “The Power of the Dog” and realized it had some connection to a Kipling story I read last year. The Everyman Pocket Classic, Dog Stories includes a Kipling tale first published in the December 23, 1899 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. The story is one called “Garm—A Hostage” and was accompanied by the poem “The Power of the Dog.” It is a poignant tale set in colonial India, about a bull terrier of extraordinary intelligence and devotion. The story is fueled by a bond of love and trust that would soften the hardest of hearts. The complete story can be read here. The poem that was originally paired with the story follows.

THE POWER OF THE DOG

There is sorrow enough in the natural way

From men and women to fill our day;

But when we are certain of sorrow in store,

Why do we always arrange for more?

Brothers and sisters I bid you beware

Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie—
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years that Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers, or loaded guns,
Then you will find—it’s your own affair—
But…you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
When the whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone—wherever it goes—for good,
You still discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we’ve kept ’em the more do we grieve:

For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short time loan is as bad as a long—
So why in—Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

Misguided Circus Act

2011-12-30T07:29:00.003-05:00

Hollywood grows ever more disappointing. Bombs, shootouts, whiz bang visual effects and computer generated imaging being the common currency in the bulk of filmmaking these days, most of the results are empty of any genuine storytelling. Especially dismaying when writer, director and production company begin with an already proven story, and without all the fake fireworks fail miserably because they’ve forgotten (or never learned) how to use film in telling a story without a truckload of modern iEffects. The shortfall is even greater when the project is based on a story that has all the elements for becoming a rewarding and successful movie. In this case, the villains are Fox 2000 Pictures, along with director Francis Lawrence, writer Richard LaGravenese and producer Kevin Halloran, each having a part in ruining the movie Water for Elephants.

The picture is a complete washout, a puzzling disappointment and a project of irritating inadequacies and wrong choices. Too bad that Sara Gruen, who wrote a beautiful novel, took the money and ran. But where does one start in describing the failure of a picture with so much potential? Is it fair to blame director, screenwriter and producer, along with the film’s production company for such a complete lack of artistic success? The ‘artistic’ distinction is important, because the producers of Water for Elephants would be quick to point out that the film earned a profit, and will continue to earn more on the DVD release. Yeah, but…

Shortly before graduation from Cornell University, Jacob Jankowski’s parents are killed and he is left penniless and basically alone in Depression-era America. In his despair he fails to return for his final exams and jumps a passing train, which just happens to be a circus train carrying the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. A veterinary student with an almost-degree, Jacob is taken on as a veterinarian by the impresario. The man tells him not to worry, that it’s all smoke and mirrors anyway. But he is a cruel man, and his circus is a shoddy business on its last legs. Jacob is captivated by it all, and quickly finds his place among the drunks, misfits, hoochie-coochie girls and a menagerie of wild animals. It all ends happily after two hours, but not without casualties of both man and beast.

Twenty minutes into the picture I began to wonder if they had run out of lightbulbs while filming and decided to shoot everything in near blackness. With a thirty-eight million dollar budget is it too much to hope that the scenes will be visible, that we won’t have to pick vague shadows out of an all black screen? Or perhaps it was meant as a camouflage for Jack Fisk’s second-rate production design. In all the darkness the magic of the circus was lost. Poor lighting and production design left the film empty of all that is dazzling, colorful, electric or even mildly exciting about the circus, with none of the ‘pathetic grandeur’ described by one reviewer of Ms Gruen’s novel.

Perhaps the biggest mistake by the production team was the decision to take all the scenes in the nursing home out of the film version. The narrator of the novel is an elderly Jacob speaking years after the events being recalled, a method of storytelling skillfully exercised by the writer. In order to understand the power of the circus in the older Jacob’s life, scenes move alternately between his younger circus days and his days in a nursing home. This adds a dimension, a richness absent in the film, which introduces us to an old man (Jacob) hanging around a modern day circus entrance hoping to get inside. A huge part of the Jacob’s later life is neatly excised by screenwriter LaGravenese, and we get a sandwich-thin character hoping to get into the circus after dark. The casting of Hal Holbrook in the small role of the elderly Jacob is also up for question. Like the younger version, played by Robert Pattinson, a less known face would have served the story better.

Reese Witherspoon plays the love interest part of Marlena well enough, though the original casting idea of Scarlett Johansson might have been better. Unfortunate too that Sean Penn dropped out, making way for Christoph Waltz to play the evil circus impresario. Given the writing, his was a difficult role to play. Robert Pattinson as the young Jacob Jankowski is believable throughout and brings a quiet charm to the character. Smaller roles are all lost in the dark. Rosie the elephant is short shrifted and only half the elephant she is in the novel. Another bad choice was leaving out completely the lovable Bobo the chimp, one of the special delights of the novel.

No matter the film or the material given to work with, the director ultimately bears the largest responsibility for the final product. In Francis Lawrence, Water for Elephants was saddled with a director having little experience in feature films, but one more versed in directing music videos and moving people like Britney Spears and her dancers around a soundstage. A different director may have salvaged something of the magic in Sara Gruen’s novel.

Good Luck Soup

2011-12-29T07:59:00.003-05:00

Little doubt that many would call me a soup freak. And honestly, there’s not a whole lot to say in denying that—yeah, I like soup and enjoy making soups, especially when a new soup pot sits crying out for a first run on the stovetop. So, the weighty John Folse Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine book came off the shelf Wednesday morning, the idea to search out a tantalizing soup recipe just right for the big twelve-quart Paula Dean pot found in my Christmas stocking. There are a lot of pages and soups to look through in that cookbook, but in the end it came down to a fairly basic and easy-to-prepare soup. Someone else might have opted for another choice, but the okra and black-eyed peas won me over.

In the plantation days, black-eyed pea and okra soup was referred to as “good luck” soup. The name originated from the belief that eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day will bring good luck throughout the year. I sort of jumped the gun there, but maybe it will still work. If not, then let’s hope the last two days of this year will bring me a winning lottery ticket.

BLACK-EYED PEA AND OKRA SOUP

Ingredients:

1 pound dried black-eyed pea

1 (10 ounce) package of okra (I used about 12 ounces of fresh okra.)

1 pound cubed ham

¼ cup butter

2 cups diced onions

1 cup diced celery

½ cup diced red bell pepper

¼ cup minced garlic

1 bay leaf

1 sprig of fresh thyme

2½ quarts chicken stock

1 can of diced tomatoes

¼ cup sliced green onions

¼ cup chopped parsley

salt and cracked black pepper to taste

Louisiana hot sauce to taste

Preparation:

In a heavy bottomed Dutch oven (a big soup pot) melt butter over medium-high heat. Add onions, celery, bell pepper and garlic. Sauté 3-5 minutes or until vegetables are wilted. Stir in ham, bay leaf and thyme and cook an additional 3-5 minutes. Pour in chicken stock and black-eyed peas, bring to a rolling boil then reduce to simmer. Cover and cook approximately 1 hour, stirring occasionally. When peas are soft mash them on side of pot with a cooking spoon to help thicken finished soup. Stir in okra, tomatoes, green onions and parsley. Season to taste with salt, pepper and hot sauce. Allow to cook 20-30 minutes longer or until soup is creamy. Serve with cornbread muffins or regular cornbread.

Easy to prepare, low in cost, feeds a crowd and everyone will call it delicious.

Autumn Grasshopper

2011-12-28T08:06:00.006-05:00

Japanese woodblock printing in its early days required three people: an artist to draw the design, a woodcarver to cut the blocks, and a printer to color the blocks and make the finished prints. Over the years techniques and styles evolved and by the beginning of the twentieth century artists had begun to view the genre as stale and lacking vitality. A group of print artists debated the problem and decided the artist must do the work of designing, carving and printing, carrying the design through singly from concept to completion. A new term was devised to describe this kind of art—sôsaku hanga or creative print.

The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation is a 1968 reprint of an earlier limited edition book published in 1962. James Michener wrote the book’s accompanying text which explains how ten prints were selected by a panel of judges from the work of 275 artists. Each of the ten artists selected received payment for their work and were required to submit 510 copies of the chosen piece, keeping ten copies for their own files and finally destroying the original woodblocks. A copy of the original 475 folio limited editions of The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation released in 1962 would today be a valuable addition to any collector’s library.

An example from the 1968 first popular edition of the book was featured in Scriblets last July. That post featured the work of Maki Haku in a print titled Ushi (Ox). The prints of three other artists included in the book appear below.

Maekawa Sempan (1888-1960)

Son of a shopkeeper in Kyoto, Maekawa Sempan went to Tokyo as a young man to study art. His first job was drawing cartoons and illustrations for a satirical magazine named Pakku (Puck). Maekawa exhibited his first print in the sôsaku hanga style at the age of 31. He said of his own problems, “It took ten years to learn technique. Later, when I got acquainted with other artisans I found out they could have taught me the same things in a few hours.”

At the close of World War II things got better for sôsaku hanga artists and Maekawa was able to make a living on his prints. A favorite subject was scenes from Japanese hot springs and he published several series titled Hot Spring Notes. His popularity increased with colorful designs of ordinary people at festivals, as well as scenes depicting local customs and observations from life in the countryside. With the exception of a few linocuts, Maekawa worked exclusively with woodcuts, never displaying interest in Western techniques. His style, especially after the war was decorative, cheerful and colorful.

Rampu (Lamp) by Maekawa Sempan, 1960-61

The artist’s comment: “Autumn is my favorite season, particularly early autumn when the first cool days come around. In this print I fetched from my childhood memories of autumn days one of the lamps that we used to use and then perched an autumn insect on it.”

Mori Yoshitoshi (1896-1992)

For most of his life Mori Yoshitoshi worked as a textile designer and only began creating art prints at the age of 57. Born in Tokyo and trained at the Kawabata School of Fine Arts, after graduation he became a textile designer and dyer of kimono fabrics. Mori preferred earth colors as well as idealistic subjects taken from folk art, kabuki theater or characters in Japanese mythology, designs often humorous and expressing dynamic movement.

The artist enjoyed incredible energy in his later years. From the late 50s until the end of his life he exhibited regularly in Japan as well as abroad. Prints by Mori hang in major museums worldwide, including the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Barcelona Museum of Arts and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His works are today rather rare and high priced.

Kagura no doke (Kagura Buffoonery) by Mori Yoshitoshi, 1960

The artist’s comment: “This work was inspired by the comic kagura dances given at Shinto shrine festivals throughout Japan. The dancers come onto the stage, generally a roofed outdoor platform in the shrine precincts, and to the accompaniment of the traditional drum and flute give hilarious pantomimes, which are also known as fools’ dances. The idea for this print came from my fond childhood memories of such fools’ dances.”

Kinoshita Tomio (1923- )

Inspired by the work of Un’ichi Hiratsuka and self-taught, Kinoshita began making prints at the age of 32. He startled the Tokyo art world in 1957 with a series of large prints done in a striking new style. The prints were of stylized human heads in only black and one other color. Both critics and buyers were impressed and a new artist was launched. Kinoshita cut many of his blocks entirely with a single cutting tool, either a flat chisel or a U-shaped gouge. He used the gouge to cut jagged parallel lines to define shapes such as the faces and bodies of partly abstracted human figures and to resemble the grain of wood.

The chief characteristic in the print shown here is the jagged lines which the artist used to convey the sense of woodgrain, an artistic invention that turns out to be better than realism. It was carved on two Judas tree boards and printed on natural color torinoko paper, a permanent type made from natural fiber; printed with carmine and vermilion watercolors to achieve the orange, and sumi ink for the black. Kinoshita made three impressions of the orange, and two for the black.

Kao 3 (Faces No. 3) by Kinoshita Tomio, 1959-61

The artist’s comment: “A full title for this print would be ‘Faces of the Weak Courageously Attempting to Move Forward in a World of Darkness.’ This is one in a series of prints I have been working on for four or five years, all having the common motif of faces or masks. In combinations of faces such as the present I am trying to express the sufferings of society, of man, of mankind, of all living beings. I am not too certain of my results: perhaps in the end I have produced mere ‘prints.’”

Corn Dogs & Dentures

2011-12-27T07:38:00.008-05:00

Alphabet building blocks have no place in my memories of childhood. Can’t recall ever playing with them and certainly no one ever sat on the floor showing me how to spell out words with blocks. Though never a plaything in my home, they were around in other places and a vague scratch of recollection tells me a set of them rested on a table in the children’s section of the local library down on Laurel Street in long ago Baton Rouge.

Sometime around 1690 the English philosopher John Locke made the statement that dice and other playthings with letters on them teach children numbers and alphabet through play, making the business of learning to read a more enjoyable experience. You have to wonder if that’s what illustrator Christian Northeast had in mind when he created his XYZ Blocks for Fred & Friends. As the package insert says, here is a “different perspective on the ABCs of modern life.” A look through the full set of Fred & Friends XYZ Blocks leads one to think they were created with the children of Lady Gaga or Adam Lambert in mind. Apart from the letters of the alphabet and numbers, the Christian Northeast blocks include moods and illustrated words. To take just one example, the block illustrating the letter M also has U, meatloaf, underpants, mustache and uvula.

It’s the kind of Christmas gift you could expect from someone who understands your sense of humor. Word got out somehow that I would be thrilled with a set of the Christian Northeast XYZ Blocks, and I am; thrilled to the tips of my fingers. For sure there are youngsters who would enjoy the puzzle of figuring out labeled images of such as Afro, werewolf, vinyl and outhouse. For my part, the pleasure comes from admiring a modern and cleverly done twist on something that has been around for over a hundred years. After looking at each of the sixteen blocks I put them in a bowl on the coffee table for visitors to puzzle over—if nothing else, a heap of dazzling color in a combination of letters, numbers, words and images.

The photo below shows one side of the full set of sixteen. Going way beyond simple letters of the alphabet, the designer has included emotions, as well as words that at least lead to a degree of cultural literacy. Yard Sale? Graffiti? Corn Dog? Hats off to the designer, Christian Northeast.

Package insert that comes with the XYZ Blocks…

Transylvanian Lemons

2011-12-26T07:56:00.008-05:00

For a long time my sister has been badgering me about the lemons on her backyard tree. “Look at all the lemons! Take some home.” I’ve heard this three or four times and on her last visit she brought a bag of them and left them in my kitchen. Now, I like lemons very much and I use at least a couple of them each week in this or that recipe or drink. But there’s something about these backyard lemons that raise an eyebrow or two. Granted, lemons in the supermarket have gone through a beautification program before making it to the produce bins, and probably a crate or more get tossed on appearance alone. As for the backyard lemons from Maitland, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that they are a strain of lemons cultivated in Transylvania, maybe even in Dracula’s own backyard.

Determined to get others to appreciate her lemons, my sister decided to make a backyard lemon pie to add to the dessert table for Christmas dinner. After the twelve gathered around the table finished with turkey, dressing, sweet potato casserole, corn soufflé, broccoli, cauliflower, red pears, congealed salad and hot rolls, thoughts came around to a taste of something sweet. Passing on the pecan pie and carrot cake, I went for the lemon pie. Five minutes later, sitting on the back porch enjoying my king sized slice of lemon meringue pie I heard my sister’s high pitched warning bouncing off the walls: “Don’t eat the lemon pie! Stop! Throw it away and cast the devil out of my kitchen!” I swallowed another bite wondering what the hell she was going on about.

Seems that everyone but me thought the lemon pie was bitter and inedible. Huh? To my taste the pie was perfectly delicious and about as close to bitter as a cup of sugar. Could it be that everyone got a look at the lemons from that backyard tree, deciding that nothing good could come from such ugly specimens? I finished my slice to the last crumb and went straight to the kitchen and wrapped that pie to take home. The others stood around me brandishing bulbs of garlic and threatening to bring in holy water. My sister, the cook (with three Michelin stars) determined it was a bitter aftertaste that ruined the pie. I can’t wait to have another piece with coffee later tonight.

Questionable desserts aside, Christmas Day turned out to be an occasion to catch up with family members usually not around my neck of the Florida sands, and also to meet a few others outside the family. In addition to being a gourmet cook who could impress Gordon Ramsey, sister Beverly is the queen of making people feel welcome and at home. She did it again on Christmas day.

Pears simmered in water with cinnamon red hots and then marinated to get the color.

Came home with a huge rosemary plant (one-time neighbor of the ugly backyard lemon tree) and a 12 quart enamel soup pot, the perfect vessel for my ongoing attempts at soup, gumbo and chili. I will have to research John Folse and his south Louisiana Creole-Cajun soup & gumbo recipes for the proper christening.

No indication of a bitter lemon influence in this healthy rosemary plant.

Soup pot for a table of fifteen hungry eaters

Congealed salad with chopped walnuts, chopped pineapple, cranberries and dark bing cherries

Christmas Cheer

2011-12-25T07:32:00.003-05:00

Thomas Tusser was an English poet and farmer. “Christmas Cheer” is his sixteenth-century version of a wonderful Christmas feast.

CHRISTMAS CHEER

Good husband and huswife, now chiefly be glad,
Things handsome to have, as they ought to be had.
They both do provide, against Christmas do come,
To welcome their neighbors, good cheer to have some.

Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall,
Brawn, pudding, and souse, and good mustard withal.
Beef, mutton, and pork, and good pies of the best,
Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest,
Cheese, apples and nuts, and good carols to hear,
As then in the country is counted good cheer.

What cost to good husband, is any of this?
Good household provision only it is:
Of other the like, I do leave out a many,
That costeth the husband never a penny.

Let our prayers be that all throughout the world will enjoy the blessing of a full stomach on this special day.

Visions of Sugar-Plums

2011-12-24T07:45:00.006-05:00

Tradition dictates that tonight, if not the eyes then the dreams of many children will be focused upon a jolly and portly old whitebeard traveling the skies with reindeer and sacks of toys. Santa Claus above all others is a character made up of the qualities that bring smiles to young faces. The figure who is today familiar all over the world is a synthesis of several types that have evolved since the early fourth century, beginning in the southwest of Turkey with a church bishop who eventually came to be called Saint Nicholas, a man renown for his generosity and his fondness for children. But this was at a time long before Christmas began to be associated with a man named Santa Claus.

Roman accounts tell us of St Nick, a bishop who made his rounds in red and white robes, including a twin-peaked miter and hooked staff, but instead of reindeer the humble churchman made his way on the back of a donkey. The day of his arrival was December 6, a Christian feast day and his gifts were meager portions of fruit, nuts, hard candies and small wooden figurines.

The scenario becomes a little more familiar in sixteenth century Holland, where children placed wooden shoes by the hearth the night of St Nicholas’s arrival. The shoes were filled with straw intended as food for the saint’s tired donkey. In place of the straw Nicholas left a small treat inside each shoe. The Dutch brought the tradition with them to America, where over time the wooden shoe was replaced by an expandable stocking hung by the chimney, minus the straw. Somewhere along the way the gift for St Nick’s donkey got left behind while a big stocking good for holding more treats took its place.

The Dutch spelling of St Nicholas was Sint Nikolass, which in America became “Sinterklass.” The name was anglicized into Santa Claus by the English when they took control of New York from the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The lore surrounding our modern-day Santa Claus originated in America, almost completely from Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “The Night before Christmas.” The poem was meant for Moore’s children and not anything he wanted credit for. As a classical scholar, Dr Moore was concerned the poem might damage his reputation. But a newspaper got hold of a copy and the poem spread like wildfire. (Moore’s authorship has been disputed, some giving credit to poet Henry Livingston Jr.)

The original St Nicholas was a tall, slender and very elegant bishop, an image carried forward for centuries, and it was only in America that he became the roly-poly Santa with rosy cheeks. We have a nineteenth century cartoonist to thank for that image. From 1863 until 1886 Thomas Nast created a series of Christmas drawings for Harper’s Weekly. Looking at the Nast drawings done over a twenty year span, a gradual evolution in Santa can be seen. He began with a pudgy elf-like man resembling the St Nick of “The Night Before Christmas”

A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf…

From this he became the life-size pot belly we now see on street corners and Hallmark cards. It was also from Thomas Nast that we built a life for Santa that covered his North Pole home and daily work of making toys for children, as well as hours spent reading their letters with requests for special gifts and checking up on whether they are naughty or nice.

Stationery Hobby Box No. 21

2011-12-23T08:02:00.008-05:00

A Christmas present from Japan arrived yesterday, a compact and glossy 152 pages in the delightful shape of Stationery Hobby Box (Shumi no bungu bako), Volume 21. There’s a good and a bad side to sitting in Florida reading each issue of this magazine three times a year. Compare it to a thirsty man looking at photos of a gurgling stream or rivers of clear water. There are probably few cities in the world as rich in stationery goods as Tokyo, and a good part of that wealth is lavishly displayed in the pages of Stationery Hobby Box. Wise to keep a handkerchief handy when I’m reading, something to catch the drool that threatens to fall from my open mouth.

Each issue of the magazine is comprehensive in its coverage of stationery goods, designers, specialists and stores devoted to the hobby, always including two or three special articles that focus on a particular pen company or penmeister, ink, or as in No. 21, an article on the history of Tonbow pencils. The cover of the latest issue shows a photo of the fountain pen favored by fashion designer Karl Lagerfield, a new design from S.T. Dupont dubbed Mon Dupont. One feature article unrelated to the Dupont is, in loose translation “Pen and Ink, Never Enough.” Ink samples, ink catalogs, discussions and essays on the same are terrific, but in most cases my interest recently has leaned toward coverage of people who spend their days writing with either pen, brush or pencil, and those articles with a focus on the history of certain stationery items.

Hikozô Akamatsu spends his days designing titles for movies and other media. A few of the movie titles designed by Mr Akamatsu are Shall We Dance, Waterboys, Hanabi, No Longer Human and Unagi. The first title may be familiar from the Hollywood adaptation starring Richard Gere, but these titles are naturally all for Japanese films. The photo on the right above shows the artist in his studio, and the top left a series of studies for his work on No Longer Human—reading from top to bottom Ningen shikaku. Once again, this title is perhaps familiar from Dazai Osamu’s classic 1948 novel. The work done by Mr Akamatsu was for a 2010 film version. One part of the Hobby Box article tells us that his favorite fountain pen is a Montblanc Meisterstück 149.

Another article in the new issue that caught my eye is one on the history of Tonbow pencil manufacture in Japan. The Japanese take their pencils very seriously and even young elementary school students study the types and varieties available in their neighborhood stationery stores. The photo above shows eight different one-dozen boxes of pencils made by Tonbow (founded by Mitsubishi in 1913). Mitsubishi continued making pencils during the war years from 1933 to 1935, selling them domestically, but production was later crippled by American bombing. The 8900 (top left) was introduced in 1945. Today Tonbow is a thriving enterprise.

The photo above shows a collection of early Montblanc fountain pens. Even though Japan boasts three premier fountain pen makers, Montblanc continues to be a longtime favorite among Japanese aficionados. The photo here shows examples of Montblanc’s early models. The third from the top, the one with the red star on its cap is the 1914 Rouge et Noir, priced at $11,500.

These photos show the stationery departments in two Tokyo stores, one located in the Yûrakucho area, the other in Ginza. The top picture was taken inside Loft, a large almost-department store, selling everything from toothpicks to mountain climbing gear. The pictures are small but do convey an image of Loft’s extensive stationery department. The pictures at the bottom of the page were taken in the Ginza Tokyu Hands store, one similar to Loft. Row after row, aisle after aisle of nothing but pens, pencils, paper, ink, tape, clips, erasers, sharpeners and on and on.

Closing the final page of Stationery Hobby Box I ‘wake up’ to remember I’m 10,000 miles away from it all. Sigh…

Posts on earlier issues of Stationery Hobby Box: 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15 and 13