enthusiasm is contagious

Today I will go ramp harvesting on the old rail trail in...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:07:05 -0400

Today I will go ramp harvesting on the old rail trail in Trumbull and then drive to the old rail trail park in Manhattan and sell ramps from an overcoat to New Yorkers. (In my imagination) (I think I could probably do ok with this plan) (is freelance ramp salesmanship on the High Line permitted?) (would people buy ramps from the inside of an overcoat?) dark-rye:

Down & Dirty: Ramps

Every week we get Down & Dirty, in which we break down our favorite seasonal fruits, vegetables, and more by the numbers. ~ Food 52

Today we celebrate the too-short season of ramps, our vegetable of the week. As we wrote during our contest for Your Best Ramps, they have a sweet pungency that many believe trumps all others in the onion family. Fleeting as they are, now’s the time to capture their fragrant bite.

1. Born to be Wild: Native to the northeastern US (though they can be found as far west as Wisconsin and as far south as Tennessee), a ramp is nothing more than a wild leek, just another member of the Allium family along with garlic, onions, chives, and shallots. The bulb has a pungent, garlicky-oniony smell; the leaves have a soft crunch like flower petals and a more deliciate onion flavor.

Most commonly, ramps love to grow in the rich, heavily shaded soil of a dense forest floor. They’re one of the first plants to appear in the early spring, as the light, moisture, and temperature conditions reach a perfect balance for their growth.

When raised from seed, ramps can take up to 18 months just to germinate because they need alternating warm and cool temperatures to send up shoots. After breaking through the soil, ramps need 5 to 7 years of growth — most of which happens during that sweet spot in spring — before they can be harvested.

2. Popularity Contest: In recent years, ramps have become extremely popular — the combination of a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it growing season, its wild origins, and a unique taste has proved irresistable in farmers’ markets and restaurants. It’s hard to believe that in the past ramps were almost exclusively consumed by rural communities who welcomed them as the first taste of foraged green after a long, harsh winter.

And ramps are almost always foraged! Research into domesicated ramp harvests is ongoing, but the long seed-to-harvest time and finicky growing conditions make them difficult and costly to grow reliably. If you wait too long into warm weather, the leaves grow tough and the bulbs separate into cloves that will become next year’s shoots. If you don’t wait long enough, the shoots are too delicate to harvest and store.

In recent years, many have worried that the over-harvesting of ramps will harm their availability in the future — after all, most of the ramps you see at market are sold with roots, which take up to 7 years to fully mature. Sustainable foraging is the solution — harvesting only 10-15% of a patch of ramps in a given year gives the area a chance to regrow and replenish. Alternately, harvesting only the leaves of the plant means that the root will live to grow another batch of them, ensuring their availability for years to come.

For some ramp foragers, though, recommending sustainable practices isn’t enough — this man was blindfolded before being taken on a trip to gather ramps! Whether you plant them from seed and patiently wait for a harvest, or go out in the woods to find your own, it’s good to know that ramps won’t be going extinct any time soon.

3. In the Kitchen: If you’re more of an impulse buyer than a saver, then look to recipes like Tom Hirschfeld’s Ramp Stuffing. Laura Loesch-Quintin brilliantly brings together the early-spring trifecta of ramps, asparagus, and peas in a classic Spring Risotto, and on the lustier end of the spectrum is mrslarkin’s Ramp Tramp Pizza with its gutsy pairing of bacon and barely cooked ramps. And in 2010, our senior editor Kristen interviewed a ramp seller who recommended grilling them!

It’s clear that ramps aren’t just a trend — there isn’t anything else that tastes quite like them. In a few weeks when we’ve had our fill they’ll quietly fade out of the markets. Now’s the time to enjoy them (responsibly) before starting the countdown to next spring.

Photos by James Ransom

At Food52, we cook from a place where kitchens meet. We have strong feelings about egg-frying methods, we love a good recipe contest (and a kitchen hack even more), and we’d be nowhere without our supportive community of cooks.

morning/frost/feathers hawk overhead swoops silently headless...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:31:33 -0400

morning/frost/feathers

hawk overhead swoops silently

headless st. francis looks on

unperturbed

(ear to the ground)

from his eyeballs at ground level

thisbelongsinamuseum: Because Black History Month ends tomorrow...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:27:20 -0500

thisbelongsinamuseum:

Because Black History Month ends tomorrow and this week’s theme seems to be all about wax, I believe this is the perfect time to tell you about Oran Z’s Pan African Black Facts and Wax Museum. Located in the middle of a strip mall in south Los Angeles, this sprawling museum isn’t just full of famous black figures cast in wax (like President Barack Obama and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall above). No, it’s also home to thousands of Black Americana artifacts, everything from slave shackles and once-popular “Mamie” cookie jars to a flag signed by Barack Obama and an African-American reference library. There are old advertisements, Negro League baseball memorabilia, postcards, toys, sheet music, KKK paraphernalia and even antique Kente cloths. If you’re lucky, the owner Oran Z. Belgrave (who also happens to be the inventor of the World’s Fastest Hair Weaver, which has its own museum display and is available for purchase in the shop of course) will give you a personal tour. According to Oran Z, he is ”just a collector…I present the figures and the facts, and it’s up to you to interpret what’s important. I collect everything African-American. If it’s for blacks, against blacks, I collect it all.” This whole thing began decades ago when Oran Z collected cookie jars and play dolls of African-American design. His collection grew to include African-American documents, books and wax figures. In December of 1999, his collection became a museum, bankrolled with his highly successful hair-weaving product. The museum quickly outgrew its original 2,000-square-foot space and adjacent 14,000-square-foot storage. Now six shipping containers sit behind the building housing separate collections, including “Holocaust of Black America,” with a partly reconstructed slave ship and racks of black mannequins shackled to wood frames. He hosts field trips and community events where children can learn more about African culture, and hopes many of his exhibits will travel across the country to be displayed in schools. Unfortunately, his museum might be forced to move or close due to a redevelopment and gentrification plan. ”I guess they don’t think it’s a good idea to have a black museum owned by a black man located in a black neighborhood on Martin Luther King Boulevard,” says Oran Z.

(Image Source)

(Info and Image Source)

were I a single lady, I’d read this and decide to bang...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:33:22 -0500

were I a single lady, I’d read this and decide to bang more fishermen. danger + muscles = sexual attraction. loggers get no love from me…but apparently I can justify pillaging the seafloor because I like the taste of meaty sea goodness (om nom nom seafood). (I’m not saying it is right, I am just saying it is my proclivity…to find job dangerousness an aphrodisiac.) wondering if we include self-harm & mental illness, what impact would this have on this chart? dentists start ranking…and postal workers appear as well. you’ll never find me banging a policeman because I think they don’t get to use their bodies as much, and while I like a uniform…I don’t like power/anger issues and I think people drawn to that profession are often powerhungry. firefighters are a notorious sex symbol and they often know how to cook.

jeffbradynpr:

The Deadliest Jobs In America, In One Graphic

From NPR’s Planet Money:

“Here’s a look at the rate of work-related, on-the-job deaths in 2011 for U.S. workers. We included the three deadliest occupations, along with a handful of other jobs. (Here’s the complete list, which comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)”

At Martin Luther King's House

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:13:58 -0500

(Wrote this in 2009 and re-reads mean I might want to re-write it…but Happy MLK Day.)

In late January, I visited the city of Atlanta, Georgia on a business trip. Since we just celebrated the election of America’s first black president and what would have been Martin Luther King’s 80th birthday, it seemed appropriate to head over to the neighborhood where King grew up, which is now a national historic sight. King’s house is the third most popular National Historic Sight in the Nation, which suggests that his legacy and his message still resonate with the American people, 40 years after his assassination.

From the airport, I took the train from the airport to the KING MEMORIAL stop, then walked a few blocks to the neighborhood. Outside the station, I asked a guy for directions and he directed me via the shortest route, but then he hesitated and suggested another route—I might want to walk up a few blocks and then take a left. I insisted I’d just do what he said, take the quickest route. The other folks on the street with me looked decidedly under-employed, and I understood then why the man outside the station had thought I might prefer another walking route.

I might have been in any other urban city hollowed out by the development of the highway system and the allure of suburban neighborhoods. There were a lot of empty lots and garbage, and a lot of urban core gone shabby, but in the distance the glassy high-rises that support this city of 519,000 reminded me of how we measure progress in this era.

This evidence of neglect and poverty was the reason that the man who’d given me directions paused and suggested a longer route, because he wanted to spare me, a white girl in a white puffy coat, the experience of walking in an area where I’d be a minority. To be honest, I’d understood his hesitation then, most people have lost touch with the experience of walking on the streets, but I also felt the way I’ve felt since giving up my car 8 months ago—America is a place we see on foot, and so much is overlooked driving 65 miles an hour. A few months back, I’d let my sister and a hotel concierge convince me that it was too dangerous to visit Walt Whitman’s house, in another urban city—Camden, New Jersey—and I wasn’t about to let a slightly shady neighborhood prevent my appreciation of an American legacy again.

A block from the Ebenezer Baptist Church I saw a window empty of everything but a nice Obama PROGRESS poster in the window, and I knew I must be nearing my destination. I had intended to maybe see some other things in town, like the puppet museum and the museum of paper history, but I ended up spending the better part of 3 hours in the neighborhood where King grew up.

I watched a film on the history of the civil rights movement in the theater at the Visitor’s Center with some Japanese tourists. Then I walked around the exhibits in the center, which included audio and video and letters written to MLK’s children after his assassination. The wooden mule-pulled cart that had transported King’s body across the city of Atlanta was on display in a side room where they showed video of Americans visiting the Lorraine Motel.

At the house where MLK grew up, I learned that King’s grandparents had purchased the home for $3500 in 1909. These facts seemed delightfully quaint in the midst of this nation’s mortgage crisis. Later that evening I dined with a relative who was once acting Vice President of a Mortgage Firm in Atlanta who confessed that she wasn’t always certain she’d have a job next month.

The King birth home—located at 501 Auburn Avenue—was the home Martin grew up in until the age of 12. Before eating dinner, he & his siblings had to recite bible verses from memory. There, we were shown the room where King’ mother gave birth to Martin, we learned that monopoly was his favorite board game, and that as a child his siblings called him “ML.” Perhaps my favorite part of home was the historical re-imaginings in the children’s bedrooms—the children’s favorite toys—jacks, monopoly, roller skates, lay around the rooms as though abandoned moments before. I imagine, given the strict but loving nature of MLK’s childhood, that not cleaning up your room, as these rooms were shown, would be grounds for more bible verse recitation. I also liked seeing the sleeping porch, located on the front of the house, where the children would sleep on hot summer evenings in the era before air conditioning.

Dr. King graduated from high school in 1944, at the age of 15. In the summer between college and his enrollment at Morehouse College in Atlanta, he moved to Simsbury, Connecticut to work in the tobacco fields. At the time, there was a severe labor shortage in the industry, and the farm (Cullman Brothers) was recruiting Black Southern college students to work the fields. Connecticut appealed to students, who could enjoy the benefits of a society in which the color of their skin didn’t matter, if only briefly. At the museum, they seemed to suggest that King’s time in Connecticut made him aware of the power of the ministry, which was he eventually studied in college. King acted as a spiritual advisor to his fellow farm workers that summer, and found that despite his intention to blaze his own path (rather than becoming a minister, as his father and grandfather had) he did feel a called to the ministry.

On Saturdays, students would head to Hartford to see live shows, shop, and dine. At the time, Hartford was a bustling metropolis of somewhere between 166,000-177,000 people. The late 1950s & 1960s would begin an era of suburban flight, just the kind that makes Atlanta’s core only home to half a million people, while its surrounding suburbs are home to over 5 million. Today, greater Hartford supports a population of 1,188,841, but the city center itself is home to only 124,512. The gifts of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System are our sprawling bedroom communities.

MLK wrote home to his mother in June 1944, “Yesterday we didn’s work so we went to Hardford we really had a nice time there. I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we …ate in one of the finest restaurant in Hardford. And we went to the largest shows there. It is really a large city.”

During this era, black travelers on the train from the South had to sit behind curtains in the dining cars. Once they reached Washington, DC, the trains were no longer segregated and they could sit wherever they liked. In his autobiography King wrote: “After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation. It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta.”

I travelled to Atlanta knowing none of this, and inspired to visit King’s home by the energy that the election of Barack Obama had brought to my country. I wanted to move my understanding of King’s legacy from a place informed by platitudes and white folks proclaiming that now, we are truly “Living the Dream,” to a place that was more nuanced, and more informed.

Before his assassination, Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were beginning plans for a Poor People’s Campaign to confront poverty by encouraging the poor to take up residence on the mall in Washington—a place where they could not be ignored. At the same time, King’s interest in the trappings of his success—money, a nice house, material things—were waning. His death left his wife & children with a great legacy, but no riches. In the time since his death, King’s image and his words have been tightly controlled by of his wife Coretta and his family. Their methods for preserving his legacy were sometimes criticized for being overzealous, including a time in 1996 when the King estate sued CBS for using long excerpts of his “I Have a Dream” speech. Sometime after this, they reversed course in resisting commercialization of King’s name, image, and copyright and began selling cds of King’s speeches, among other things.

At the two gift shops I visited at the Historical Sight and at the King Center there were a lot of badly designed posters and t-shirts collections. It was possible to buy a commemorative MLK bust manufactured in China. This is America, I kept thinking, celebrating the legacy of an American Civil Rights leader by purchasing goods manufactured in China. I did end up purchasing some cds—among them, King’s speech “Why I oppose the war in Vietnam” which would posthumously win him a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording. It was also interesting to contrast this tight control over King’s image and speeches with that of Barack Obama.

On a recent trip to New York’s garment district it was possible to purchase at least 100 different clothing variations on the theme of president Obama. The control of Obama’s image—or the lack of control—helped to spawn a kind of handmade success that is unique to this era, and I think is informed by the knowledge that when people feel a sense of ownership or investment in their leaders, when they can knit gloves with his name on them or buy original art posters made by Obama supporters to invest in the campaign, his success feels like their success as well. There were no King t-shirts in evidence in any of the gift shops that I would deem awesome or artful enough to wear home. There were no objects for sale imbued with the kind of personalized spirit that made “Mommas for Obama” possible.

In the time since King’s death the gap between rich and poor in this nation has continued to expand. A 1996 Census Bureau report found that the wealthiest fifth of the population’s income increased 44% from 1968-1994 (growing from $73,754 to $105,945), while the income of the poorest fifth of the population grew only 8%, from $7,202 to $7,762.

If the problems of poverty were ignored in the late 1960s, when King wanted to bring them to the national consciousness by encouraging the poor to set up a squatter’s village on the National Mall, the wreckage of our financial system is evidence that ignoring poverty continues to have far-reaching consequences. Our nation’s mortgage crisis was fueled by the idea that homeownership should be available to everyone, regardless of whether or not the mortgage terms would be kind to the homeowner, when interest rates re-adjusted. I can’t imagine the fiscal conservatives of the King Household on Auburn Ave—who rented out one of their bedrooms to college students to help cover the mortgage payments—could fathom the depth of our current mess. The wreckage of this era of laissez fair regulation sits in our neighborhoods, being sold by banks for less than the loans due on them.

And I can’t help thinking that Martin Luther King’s tremendous power as a leader and thinker—if it had not been snuffed out in suspicious circumstances in 1968—could certainly have expanded the levels of freedom, justice, and equality in our time. Martin Luther King’s legacy has been softened for public consumption, he isn’t remembered as a radical, but he spoke out against the war in Vietnam long before it became politically expedient to do so, and began to focus his attention on issues of social justice that transcended race.

I was thinking about all of these things—the nearly 2 million people gathered on the national mall to see the election of America’s first black president, the wreckage of the mortgage crisis, the highway system as a shaper and emptying force of America’s cities, when I flew home to Windsor Locks, which is 15 miles from the farm in Simsbury that shaped King in the summer of 1944.

I was thinking also about the folks from Springfield who I met at the museum, and who I joked with about how tiny MLK was. They couldn’t believe that he fit into his little suits, and I mentioned that in the video I’d seen at the visitor’s center, Coretta Scott King talks about how the first time she saw him in Boston, she was struck by how tiny he was, and how he looked like a little boy. She said that feeling dissipated soon after she spoke with him. So often, we forget that our heroes are humans, sometimes tiny, sometimes big-eared, who face the same obstacles that we do in life. The exhibit at the King Center displayed his Nobel Prize and his cufflink collection.

I was thinking as well of King’s Nobel Prize Speech, which speaks to the power of the people who make movements possible, but who often don’t appear in the history books for their countless immeasurable contributions. The speech made me think of many recent events, the election of Barack Obama, the people on the flight that landed in the Hudson River, and the countless freedom fighters, civil rights activists, and nameless thousands who have laid the groundwork that brought us to this place in history—a place that is no less untenable as any other time in history, but a place where we once again have faith that progress towards justice is possible.

In his speech, King said:

“Today I come to Oslo as a trustee, inspired and with renewed dedication to humanity. I accept this prize on behalf of all men who love peace and brotherhood. I say I come as a trustee, for in the depths of my heart I am aware that this prize is much more than an honor to me personally.

Every time I take a flight I am always mindful of the man people who make a successful journey possible — the known pilots and the unknown ground crew.

So you honor the dedicated pilots of our struggle who have sat at the controls as the freedom movement soared into orbit. You honor, once again, Chief (Albert) Luthuli of South Africa, whose struggles with and for his people, are still met with the most brutal expression of man’s inhumanity to man.

You honor the ground crew without whose labor and sacrifices the jet flights to freedom could never have left the earth.

Most of these people will never make the headlines and their names will not appear in Who’s Who. Yet when years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live — men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization — because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake.”

via recursivemuffin: James Plafke over at Geekosystem has just...

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:07:10 -0500

via recursivemuffin:

James Plafke over at Geekosystem has just posted an awesome-if-true article about Samuel Beckett giving the young Andre the Giant rides to school….

I love these miles of effortless driving. I hope the highways in...

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:01:58 -0500

I love these miles of effortless driving. I hope the highways in heaven are as smooth as this scene. Rest in peace, Dave Brubeck.

npr: The Porcupine Black Market Comes To Pennsylvania “If...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:31:53 -0500

npr:

The Porcupine Black Market Comes To Pennsylvania

“If you’re familiar with porcupines, they can cause an enormous amount of damage to a rural home,” Jerry Feaser told me. “They literally chew through things.”

Feaser works for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, which has lately been wrestling with porcupine trouble. State law lets homeowners kill animals that are causing damage to homes — provided the animals are caught in the act.

“The problem is that porcupines are nocturnal, and the [low] likelihood that someone is actually going to catch them in the act is an obstacle,” Feaser told me.

So last year, the commission created a hunting season on porcupines. They figured this would give homeowners an opportunity to kill porcupines that were causing trouble, even if they couldn’t catch them red handed (red-quilled?).

Then the invisible hand of the porcupine black market reached into rural Pennsylvania.

-Jacob Goldstein

stained glass at keflavik on Flickr. This is the ceiling of the...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:06:00 -0500

stained glass at keflavik on Flickr.

This is the ceiling of the airport in Keflavik.

Last year on the last day of February I was returning to America by airplane.

It had been a very long journey, and I was looking forward to returning to my home, my lover, and to my dog. In preparation for the trip I had read only one book about explorers, which was about the guys that got stuck in the sea off greenland. In it I learned that without the natives, particularly without a lady Inuit named Tookoolito, the explorers would have died. Even with the natives, they were up to some dumb stuff in the name of adventure. Is this the story with all adventurers? Maybe.

Back in Norway, earlier on the trip, while we were devouring the best meal we ate in the coldest tent ever, [somewhere in the wilderness (in the neighborhood of where? We traveled 46 miles by dogsled. (South of Finse, North of Oslo)] our guide described being on Greenland and staring up at airplanes flying over him and imagining the residents of those planes eating the meal he was preparing for us. If I said this was the only time I liked him, it would be a half-truth, but it was a moment when I felt like he had dropped a little of the macho ego that made the portion of the voyage with him sort of reckless and dangerous and barely tolerable.

I like it when we remember we are small drops in a big freaking universe and here he was, admitting it, and talking about the foods he fantasized about while he himself was forcing himself to eat the 4 staples of the Amundsen expeditioners. I can’t remember if this was the same night that the camp stove was filling the tent with noxious fumes or not.

On the flight home, we flew over Greenland and Newfoundland and I peered down on the continents, and I felt small and alive. On the tv there was a really not very excellent movie, a sequel called “Wall Street: Money never sleeps” but what is important about this film was that the soundtrack was songs from the David Byrne & Brian Eno collaboration record, “Everything that happens will happen today.” I would argue that David Byrne really knows how to write songs about home. There was this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYYU1mJSeOs and there was a lot of images of New York, where we would fly into in a few hours. I never really think of Manhattan as my home, unless I am far from home and trying to describe what I am near. I am near Manhattan. When I first went to college on the West Coast I would encounter people who had never been to Manhattan and think I was really awesome because I was only a train ride away from there. “You’ve never been to NY!?” I’d say, as though this was some thing that we all must do if we want to be sophisticated 19 year olds. Goodness, what an ass I was.

The music was from a record I had listened to a great deal in the year and a half before the trip, the record helped to ground me in my place in the world, and I had seen D.Byrne perform the music at the close of 2008.

And back on earth, will all my fingers and toes, a year later. Holy Moses that was an adventure.

I remember feeling a little out of the travelling league with all the Europeans talking about all the continents they had visited and when they asked me about myself I mumbled something about liking to travel in America. Because I do. This is a land that I have a lot of complicated feelings about but damn if it doesn’t contain multitudes. A person could spend a lifetime exploring their backyard. I am glad to be an explorer of my backyard and I am glad for adventures that remind us again that where we live is a beautiful place indeed.

Last night I rode my bike back from ballet class and I took the road that slides along the harbor and I watched the sky and the stars and I was grateful for what a year can be, and do. It was an adventure that made me appreciate the comforts of comforts. Amen

honeysuckle in a restaurant parking lot

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:10:02 -0500

honeysuckle in a restaurant parking lot

Here's Why Drivers Get Away With Murder In NYC

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:03:50 -0500

Here's Why Drivers Get Away With Murder In NYC:

“More New Yorkers are killed every year by motor vehicles than are murdered by guns, said Councilmember James Vacca, who kicked off the hearing by declaring, “We don’t accept gun violence as a way to die, and we shouldn’t accept traffic deaths either.” Vacca’s first question to Deputy Chief John Cassidy, the NYPD Chief of Transportation, was about speeding, and how often drivers caught speeding are charged with reckless endangerment. The answer came not from Cassidy, but from Susan Petito, an NYPD attorney, who politely explained that they simply don’t know, because reckless endangerment charges “are not segregated in the database” and can’t be easily found.”… More.

countessian: Second book of hundreds of things a girl can make....

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:19:51 -0500

countessian:

Second book of hundreds of things a girl can make. (Taken with instagram)

I HOPE THIS LIST INCLUDES BABIES>

“Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration....

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:05:08 -0500

“Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. Eskimo hunters traveling alone on still, glassy waters are sometimes stricken by “kayak angst”—delusions that their boat is flooding or that the front end is either sinking or rising up out of the water.” (I think this is from this: http://www.maryroach.net/packing-for-mars.html )

The Mount! American Woman Authors! on Flickr. O boos! One of my...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:08:00 -0500

The Mount! American Woman Authors! on Flickr.

O boos!
One of my best pals is in India and so I keep thinking of her and eating Indian food to feel close to her. This morning on writer’s almanac I learned that:

It’s the birthday of poet Galway Kinnell, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1927). His roommate in college was the poet W.S. Merwin, who once woke him up in the middle of the night and read Yeats to him until dawn. After that night, Kinnell devoted himself to writing poetry in the style of Yeats. He eventually found his own voice as a poet, but he named all of his children after important figures in Yeats’s work.

This reminded me of a time I sat on the porch of friendship county and read Neruda’s poems about bicycles and the beauty of girls to SLS. Earlier that day we’d hiked a mountain or visited the home of a famous lady poet, I can’t recall which it was. Maybe we just walked around and smelled trees.

Lately J and I have been getting all teary with gratefulness, and feeling so tender is a strange way to walk around in the world, isn’t it? But it is also a real way to walk around. I am grateful for the abiding friendship I have with my lover, but also grateful for the abiding friendships I have had with women who make me laugh heartily, and women who encourage me to be alive in the moment. SLS is one, yes, but I wish to honor all of them for the ways that we grow old and we grow different, but our heart and minds can come again to a place of hello again, friend! And what has been happening?

One of the troubles that scholars have in parsing the relationship between ladies in earlier times is that ladyfriendships are sometimes so fierce and loving that this love could be misconstrued (or properly construed, depending on the ladies) as sexual. Letters are rife with passionate friendship. And hell yes, I say, to passionate friendship! It could fuel my heart and mind forever, amen.

If everyone with $ was as awesome as Ms. Streep can you imagine...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:28:40 -0500

If everyone with $ was as awesome as Ms. Streep can you imagine how amazing the world we live in would be? She just marketed this film to me by being an awesome human being.

THIS IS FOR ALL THE JANUARIANS (and later Decemberians) and...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:00:23 -0500

THIS IS FOR ALL THE JANUARIANS (and later Decemberians) and Capricorns. Climb on, goaty pals, climb on.

ncpr:

Great Caesar’s goat! That is one nimble Bovidae! (And that is one sentence I’d never thought I’d be able to write for mass consumption. Thank you, Tumblr!)

lickypickystickyfree:

Capricorns are goats.
Goats are climbers.
Against all odds.

this morning a hungry hawk scared the little hearts of all the...

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:45:57 -0500

this morning a hungry hawk scared the little hearts of all the monk parakeets and finches in our neighborhood and eyeballed my dog like she might make a delicious breakfast. I tried to look menacing but I don’t have talons, so it was hard. As for the hawk, and the many bird feathers that have been turning up in the neighborhood that look like they are from small ground birds, I’m blaming the acorn problem and my leaf bag eating squirrels know all about it. Quoth the NYT, “Now the field mouse population is expected to crash — about 90 percent have died off in similar glut-dearth acorn sequences in the past. And the outlook is not good for the low-nesting birds, which face an increased threat from hawks and owls.”

this picture has nothing to do with hawks and everything to do with cousins. Also, hand me downs. I think those overalls jacob is wearing I also sported. that car in this picture had really sweet upholstery and once we crashed it in a snowstorm on our way to florida. earlier on that trip I marred an antique desk at the home of the royer grandparents with my very deep handwriting and I think my dad freaked out.

recursivemuffin:

The cousins in 1985.

devil’s hopyard

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:41:04 -0400

devil’s hopyard

thegreenurbanist: thisbigcity: Americans spend almost $9000 a...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:58:12 -0400

thegreenurbanist:

thisbigcity:

Americans spend almost $9000 a year on their cars. Is it worth it?

‘What makes a city intelligent? You do.’

Source via good.is

nancymartira:otherpress:A telegram from Dorothy Parker to her...

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:19:10 -0400

nancymartira:otherpress:A telegram from Dorothy Parker to her editor Pascal Covici (via)