look down

The other day I was getting close to the end of The Dharma Bums (audio book - with a reader whose voice is too polished to play beat poet), and Japhy Ryder suggests to the narrator, “Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by.”

You shouldn't put yourself into a trance walking down city sidewalks to work in the morning, but you can certainly watch your feet as you walk to see what you can see. And what I saw:

Pavement

Pavement

Brick sidewalk raised in gentle waves by underneath tree roots

Pavement with a scatter of yellow leaves

Blond cat and one meow

Small flat metal discs in the pavement that hide pipes that lead down to secret places

[OK, passing a bar - look up or you'll probably see something gross]

Pavement that's a smooth almost-white

Pavement that's a spread of tiny pebbles

Asphalt the color of campfire ash, painted white lines, painted yellow lines

Pavement in a long, clean ribbon but broken by one square with names carved in by stick or finger

Wet shoe prints walking

Moss growing up through cracks in pavement

Hopscotch chalk lines in faded colors

Pavement painted with the brown-gray imprints of old leaves

Manhole covers embossed with roses

A small, perfect heart drawn with blue crayon

One tiny feather-shaped leaf up on its end and twirling in the wind against the pavement.

Lovely skishshshshsh of rain on Powells' roof. Portland is my town.

an evening with coco

Excellent reading last night at Powell's City of Books: the fabulous Karen Karbo with her book The Gospel According to Coco Chanel. It's shelved under self-help, I think, at Powell's, but to me, it leans more toward biography. Is it self-help in the form of biography or biography in the form of self-help? That's some nice wolf-in-sheep's-clothing, there - and ultra elegant sheep's clothing, of course. At the reading, Karen called it "riffography," and I think that's the perfect kind of biography for a woman like Chanel. Because she may have had her ups and downs, her goods and bads, but we're not reading about her to luxuriate in her personal tragedies or bad habits - we're reading about her because deep down there's a part of us that wants to be her.

Be stylish, be big personality, be confident, be great wits, be comfortable in our skins.

The book is also very funny - and so was the reading. Karen is a great reader - has great timing. And there was a slideshow! Or powerpoint. I don't really know the difference. But there were pictures!




I like pictures!





[Seriously, did Coco ever do cigarette ads?]




The powerpoint show was framed with droll captions and sometimes tragically funny pairings of photos from Coco's time and ours.

After the reading, Karen took loads of really great questions and gave us loads of detailed answers. And was very attentive to everyone as they lined up to get books signed. My bonus for the evening was Diane Ponti, also there for the reading, so it was great chatting afterward, and great meeting a very nice writer who studies under Karen, and one person knew another person in the crowd, who knew another, and we had a nice, little group waiting in line for Karen.

Of course, me being me, I wanted to dress up for the event - something semi-demi-quasi-pseudo-reminiscent of Chanel. I consulted the book for guidelines - blacks, beiges, jackets, cardigans, sleek lines, nothing barrel-like or bubble-like... Then I consulted my very own built-in Chanel - Stephen - for his eye and expertise. He said, hmm, the jacket's not going to look good with the. And that cardigan's not as good as the. And pointed and said, how about this? I said, "Great, and it's beige! Coco loved beige!"

Stephen said, "That's not beige. That's tan."

So apparently all my life, I've never known what beige means.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I need Stephen.

Well, not the only reason why, but it's pretty important.

torn asunder

I follow a blog called The Old Foodie, which gives you, once every weekday, a bit of food history and a recipe, sometimes an old menu, and always neat musings by the blog author (blogthor?). Beyond my fascination with history-through-food, I also get a great kick out of the lovely twists of old language I get to read in her snips of nineteenth century cookbooks, eighteenth century food-writings and the like.

She's in my blog follow list, but you can check her out here.

Today's topic is an Irish potato cake called boxty (or boxtie), and I thought the explanation she included from the Dublin University Magazine of 1854 contained some fabulous bits of old language. I've bolded (emboldened?) my favorite parts...

"In the formation of potato starch the fibrous portion of the tuber, when separated and squeezed from the watery part, was mixed with coarse flour or oatmeal, and by the addition of a little kitchen stuff or butter formed into a cake popularly known in the vest as boxtie, and in the south denominated “buck bread”, “Scotchy”, or “stampy”. This was so much admired, that the children in country parts used to make a grater out of the side of an old tin can, by punching it with an awl in order to rasp lumpers for a feast of boxtie. If we have reserved to the last, the potato-cake, made by bruising with the bottom of a tin porringer, two cold well-boiled potatoes, and mixing therewith a pound of the finest flour, the yolk of a fresh egg, a print of butter, and a sup of new-milk, the whole being well kneaded then pounded with a rolling pin, made into a cake five eighths of an inch thick, cut into squares and diamonds, baked on a griddle, and when properly browned and mottled, each piece torn asunder like a muffin, and a bit of butter slipt in to melt in the interior, and then eaten at tea or breakfast but particularly at the former, it is because it was the most widely disseminated, and universally admired form of potato-eating known to all tea-drinkers and cup-tossers from Cape Clear to the Causeway."

Of course, it's just my own modern conception of the language, but I love how an unassuming little potato cake can be torn asunder. As if the poor thing was rent limb from limb by an angry mob of cup-tossers.

pie

I chose the goat cheese and caramelized onion. Years ago, it would have been the peach and berry for sure. Years ago, on the road with the circus, it was a long day driving with nothing but circus music on the stereo, or a long day under a tent, hot under the wig and makeup, knowing I couldn't really make them laugh, and then in the off-time, nothing to talk about but the circus - but in the evening late, maybe eleven, finding some plastic-booth-breakfast-anytime coffee shop at the edge of a truck stop for limp iceberg lettuce salad and my heart hungry for cherry cobbler. Ice cream sundae. Blackberry pie.

Blackberry pie, Noni's specialty, when we picked the berries in July in Virginia when I was nine.

Chocolate mousse in a wine glass with lush unsweetened whipped cream at my mom's French restaurant.

Or in high school when I discovered there was a candy machine and I could blow dart sugar into my system anytime I had fifty cents on me.

Here I am forty now, and I choose the goat cheese and caramelized onion.

It occurred to me this morning - and I should preface this by saying I worked like thirteen and a half hours yesterday and then slept six, which may be a way of life for some people but for my puny brain it tends to set off punchiness and delusions of grandeur. But it occurred to me this morning that for most of my life, I've been very immature. OK, that’s not what occurred to me this morning – I’ve known this for a long time. Tom Spanbauer once called the novel I’m writing a bildungsroman, even though it’s based on the time when I was thirty five. No, what occurred to me this morning is that my rate of maturity is directly proportionate to the rate of my lessening interest in sweets. Which really didn't happen until these last few years.

*

Now lunchtime after the morning of my post and thinking about pie makes me think about something else. It's not just maturity that's different now [and I want to go on record and say I realize I'm not actually that mature]. But the other thing is some certain personal fulfillment. Some sense of self that wasn't there before. Some vague but all important something that a big velvety, cocoa-sprinkled slab of tiramisu was never a perfect substitute for - but, in all honesty, it was a pretty good consolation prize

Plus I won a pie!

jack

I never take those Facebook quizzes. Once in a while I want to take one just to see if the grammar in the questions is as horrible as in the little snippets you see when one of your friends takes one - but, no, I never take one.

Except one time I took one. A bunch of my Dangerous Writer friends were taking the Which Famous Writer Are You [or some such] quiz, and everyone was coming up with Kerouac, and they were having such a fun time laughing about everyone coming up with Kerouac that I wanted to be Kerouac too. So I took the quiz.

Kerouac.

I think I read On the Road in high school. I say that because I was supposed to read it and I remember putting my eyes down the pages, but I don't really know what I got out of it. I think what I got out of it was bored - but then again I was in high school and if it couldn't make me cry like Of Mice and Men, I probably wasn't really absorbing much of it.

But I have a little library where I get audiobooks for my walks to and from work. This time around I came upon The Dharma Bums. And funny - listening to it, I hear little bits of my own sound. Some ways of using language, some forms of rhythm that sound good in my head and come out on the page. I'm not reeeeeaaally comparing myself to Kerouac, but after that quiz, it was fun to cut in on my walk to work that first day and say aloud, "Oh my god, I really am Kerouac."

Here's a passage I liked enough on my walk yesterday that I had to transcribe it...

"But now I was three miles into the industrial jungle of LA in mad sick sniffling smog night, and had to sleep all that night by a wire fence in a ditch by the tracks, being waked up all night by rackets of Southern Pacific and Santa Fe switchers bellyaching around, till fog and clear of midnight, when I breathed better (thinking and praying in my sack) but then more fog and smog again and horrible damp white cloud of dawn and my bag too hot to sleep in and outside too raw to stand, nothing but horror all night long, except at dawn a little bird blessed me."