Instead of Dull Dinners

Every year I go to an annual dinner for alumni of Oxford and Cambridge who live in Oregon or nearby Washington. I live as a near hermit on the side of a mountain much of the year, so I go forth to the dinner because it offers as great a variety of people as I can find in any one gathering. They are recent grads, ancient grads, English, American, Asians, Australians, Africans and Latins.

The informal conversation is always interesting. Sometimes it is also near life-saving as it was last year when an ophthalmologist told me that the Lasik eye surgery that liberated me 10 years ago from a life of glasses and contacts and near blindness underwater, might lead to sudden blindness at high altitudes as internal pressure pushes out a thinned cornea.

While such pre-dinner talk enlightens or entertains, the after dinner talk by one guest is . . . well, let us say, not as entertaining as the life I lived at Oxford. I have urged the organizers to uphold tradition. How lively is that tradition?

I could go on and recount murders and mayhem, but consider only this description of a ceremony to honor the Duke of Portland in 1793:

“. . . luckily the ladies were admitted first ; for a rush of 3,000 men was made. Gowns were torn, caps broken, and pugilistic rounds fought. The " Broad " was strewn with shoes, buckles, gowns, caps and prostrate men. Pick-pockets from town came dressed in M.A. costume.”

This blog, however, is about words, and I will illustrate with some rhymes that showed Oxford’s passion for life occasioned praises of food such as I’ve never heard for the string beans and chicken or steak served at our annual dinner.

In the mid 1700s students and faculty of Oxford enjoyed the wares of two caterers. Mrs Dorothy Spreadbury’s spiced sausage was so famous that students named a collection of verse for her product. In that book, The Oxford Sausage, we find the other cook, Ben Tyrrell, maker of mutton pies. Here is Ben’s advertisement and lines about him and his wares, as well as an opinion about which cook was best.

ADVERTISEMENT.

ALL ye that love what's nice and rarish,
At Oxford, in St. Mary's Parish,
Ben Tyrrell, Cook of high Renown,
To please the Palates of the Gown,
At Three-pence each, makes Mutton-pies,
Which thus he begs to advertise :
He welcomes all his Friends at Seven,
Each Saturday and Wednesday Even *.

* Mr. Tyrrell, Cook, in the High-ftreet, Oxford, having formed a laudable Design of obliging the University with Mutton Pies, twice a Week, this Advertisement appeared, on that Occasion, in the Oxford Journal, Nov. 25, 1758.

B No

No Relicks Hale, with Art unjust,
Lurk in Disguise beneath his Crust;
His Pies, to give you all fair Play,
Smork [smoke]only when 'tis Market-Day :
And all must own, hows his Meat,
While Jolly's Porter crowns the Treat.

If Rumps and Kidneys can allure ye,
Ben takes upon him to assure ye,
No Cook shall better hit the Taste,
In giving Life and Soul to Paste.
If cheap and good have Weight with Men,
Come all ye Youths, and sup with Ben.
If Liquor in a Mutton-pie
Has any Charms, come taste and try!
O bear me Witness, Sons!
Pierce but the Crust—the Gravy runs:
The Taster licks his Lips, and cries,
" O Rare Ben Tyrrell's Mutton Pies !"

But hold—no more—I've said enough— Or else my Pies may prove a Puff.

BEN TYRRELL's, Wednesday Kight,
December 6th, 1758.

HOW I congratulate fair Isa,
That such the Taste for Mutton Pies is!
Hail glorious Ben ! whose Genius high
First plann'd a genuine Mutton Pie!
Born to combine with matchless Taste,
The Charms of Pepper and of Paste !
Was but the Motion of my Pen
Quick as thy Rolling-Pin, O Ben !
O, could my Thoughts thy Pastry ape,
And slide, like yielding Dough, to Shape ;
My Genius, like thy Oven glow,
My Numbers, like thy Gravy flow ;
Or, in the Twinkling of an Eye,

I cook an Ode as you a. Pie;

O then (nor think, to mock thy Trade,

My Promises of Pie-Crust made)

I'd raise thy culinary Fame
Above immortal Spreadbury's Name:
Though from all Cooks, a Matron wise,
In Sausages fhe bore the Prize :
Her seasoning Hand mould yield to thine,
Thy Mutton should her Pork outshine.

On Ben TyrrEll's Pics.

LET Christmas boast her customary Treat,
A Mixture strange, of Suet, Currants, Meat,
Where various Tastes combine, the greasy, and the sweet.

Let glad Shrove-Tuesday bring the Pancake thin,
Or Fritter rich, with Apples stor'd within :
On Easter-Sunday be the Pudding seen,
To which the Tansy lends her sober Green :
And when great London hails her annual Lord,
Let quiv'ring Custard crown the AlJermannic Board.

But Ben prepares a more delicious Mess,
Substantial Fare, a Breakfast for Queen Bese :
What dainty Epicure, or greedy Glutton,
Would not prefer his Pie, that's made of Mutton ?

ARE WE ALONE?

With our ever expanding social networking and instant communication I wonder if we have outgrown a central fact of generations past or dangerously forgotten it. In the instant societies we create by computer and the way the cell phone keeps every friend and acquaintance and even emergency help no farther than a few seconds away from our needs. Twenty years ago I went to the Siberian arctic to write about an expedition of radio amateurs who were the first to be allowed to broadcast from that officially closed part of the world. It was part of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the joint broadcasts from five American and twelve Soviet radio operators were a kind of announcement to the world that people were coming together again. Today coming together is much much easier (at least if one does not live in North Korea or Cuba or Iran—and one can even meet strangers in these last two by internet or short wave radio if the proper restrictions are observed).



Back to the question-- have we outgrown a central fact of all human history or dangerously forgotten it? I don’t know the answer, but I know a few poems that pose the question. Here’s one.


THE FOG

He knew how Roman legions looked, for he
Had seen the Maine coast fogs march in from sea
For many years now, in August days.
They came in mighty columns up the bays,
Tawny and gray and silver in the sun;
They trampled out the seaports one by one,
The islands and the woods, with their high hosts
And pushed the world back inland from the coasts.

This little house was lost, these hills and dells,
Cows in a pasture faded into bells,
The world around a man closed in and in
Till nowhere was ten paces from his chin.
A man drawn up and halted with a start
To be so close to his own beating heart
And left so to himself and wholly blind
To everything but what was in his mind.

This was the peril and the comfort, too,
A man who lived in such a region knew;
On any Summer’s day, within an hour,
He might be blind and naked to a power
So vast, it might have come from stars unmade,
Undreamt of, even, making him afraid,
So mightier than the night that he could guess
How life was but a name for loneliness.

(Robert P. Tristram Coffin)

Poetry: Divine Wind v Gas

I have often argued, sometimes too brutally, that in our lives poetry has been trashed by poets and teachers who are too lazy or too ideological to give any value to the long-evolved art of poetry that includes meter, rhyme, alliteration, stanzas and other such craftsman’s tools.

The most utilitarian argument is that these tools make poetry memorable. I suspect some practitioner of a discipline called something like bio-literature or biopsychology (which does exist) has discovered an area of the brain that lights up a CAT scan when the subject hears rhyme or metered meaning.

Biopsychology we don’t need to find the proof of the utility of the tools of poetry. This afternoon, I turned to the literature of spring and I picked up an old favorite, Viscontess Wolseley’s compilation of English rural folklore, The Countryman’s Log-Book. It’s 300 plus pages are full of verse used by the people engaged in the grittiest labor of olde England to make the rules, values, and history of their world memorable.

“Be sure of hay till th’ end of May,” or your animals might starve before the new forage is ready.

Here’s one that is a riddle for moderns but easily understood in the 16th Century:

The calf, the goose, the bee
the world is ruled by these three.
(from the herald Guillim.)

From the calf comes parchment on which the most durable books and official documents were written: the Magna Carta, for instance. From the goose came the quill pen. From the bee came candles and sealing wax that made a tamperproof seal on letters and documents and that bore the unique impression of the authority issuing a document. (Sealing was made from pine rosin and bees wax.)

About the tendency of a hive’s bees to gather up their hive’s honey and leave in search of a new home (called swarming), the farmer is reminded:

If bees swarm in May, they're worth a pound and next day;
If they swarm in July, they're not worth the fly.

That is to say a swarm caught in May can still be put in a new hive and make enough honey to see them through the winter. Or perhaps they can be sold for a pound sterling to another farmer. July is too late to re-hive them or sell them.

About sheep we read:

A scabb’d sheepe will mar a whole flock,
Faith, then the Shepherd’s a Knave or a Block.

History too was recorded and made memorable by rhyme. Sure, some were long narratives by educated poets, but often enough the rhymes were simple and utilitarian:
Turkeys, Carps, Hops, Piaccarel and Beer,
Came into England all in one year.

Politics too had its expression in verse. After the Black Death struck England the law allowed the privatization of the commons land where anyone could graze cattle, sheep, and geese. Those who favored it might recite:

The country enclosed I praise
The t’other delighteth not me;
For nothing the wealth it doth raise
To such as inferior be.

That summed up what the modern biologist Garret Hardin famously called “The tragedy of the commons.” However, those who saw enclosure as a land grab by the rich (or richer) might recite:

A sin it is in man or woman
To steal a goose from off a common;
But he doth sin without excuse
Who steals the common from the goose.

This last verse is still quoted by activists who believe the rich steal from and enrich themselves at the expense of the poor.

What contemporary poetry will be remembered 10 years from now, not to mention 300 years in the future? The classic poets whose works we read in schools and universities as literature, from Homer to Hopkins, all build on this very well proven practical service of poetry to memory.

I could even suggest that this lesson might give us a simple solution to defining what is and is not art.

We remember art.
We forget the fart.

Why Wildness?

Because for most of my life I have lived and worked alone out of sight of any neighbor in the middle of hundreds of acres of forest, people often ask me, “Why do you like living out there?” I am not a misanthrope, a person who detests mankind. I not only admire the human animal above all others, but I believe over the long run civilization has made the right choices and will learn how to manage both itself and the natural environment.

Many of the people who ask why I want to live in a wild place are fellow environmentalists but of the kind who believe that the human race is at best ignorant and self-destructive, at worst, a selfish and cruel horde that pillages and plunders innocent nature. When such an environmentalist asks why I live alone, I should reverse the question and ask why he or she is not living in a wild place, enjoying a vacation from civilization and communing with the spirits of nature.

Most environmentalists feel about nature the same way they often say they feel about New York or Chicago--a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. When they do move to the country, they usually bring their domestic partners, both human and animal. Going for a walk in the woods with a dog is akin to attending a concert with a turned on paper shredder. These are often the same people who delight in drinking from clear streams oblivious to the excrement or dead bodies upstream, and who often kiss their dogs and cats who have just licked their own unbathed genitals and rectums.

I do not feel the need to drink nature’s excrement and kiss its dirty kisser exactly because I have observed it closely and thought about it long and hard. So why would anyone, including me, would want to live in a wild place without human neighbors?

My answer is power. Living here I have the thrill I experienced as a city kid entering the ocean waves for the first time. They bowled me over, tossed me around, slammed me into the sand, and spit me out in the foam. I kept going back for more. I learned to duck under the waves and to body surf on the crests, no expensive board between me and that power, something like galloping bareback.

I have come to appreciate the risks and enjoy other powers of nature—cold, wind, trees, sun, and mountains. Living with these powers and protected by few intermediaries and defenses tests our limits and defines the edges of our lives. In short, it is a way of defining who we are.

Wildness and its powers do something more important for some of us. Oddly enough the people who often find the greatest relief living in the presence of a wild power are prone to self-doubt and depression. Their personal frustrations often come from their commitment to make a difference in the civilized world. Their lack of power, if you will.

That’s how it was for me when I left my forest and served for two years as a resident adviser on housing and land reform in a Central Asian capital city of 1.5 million people. I was struggling with the language, struggling with bureaucracy there and in Washington, infuriated by the daily dose of corrupt officials, and breathing city air thick and greasy with coal smoke, car exhaust, and diesel soot.

I had the good fortune to live in a shoddy little neighborhood of old cottages instead of the tall concrete apartment buildings where the embassy security officer thought Americans should live. Every morning I got up early enough to walk outside. High above the city of Alma Ata (now Almaty), from east to west rose an unbroken wall of snow covered peaks 15,000 feet high, gleaming in the morning sun. In geological time these are new mountains, a few rifts northward toward Siberia from the Himalayas. They had been rising for millions of years. And for millions of years the snows and glaciers had been shaving them down, grinding the grit from them, cascading avalanches of mud and rock over the plains below. The city of Alma Ata and my cottage sat on a gentle slope of old avalanches. As recently as twenty years earlier the mountains had invaded parts of town with boulders and mud.

Every morning I paused to look at these mountains, to drink them in with my eyes. I grew very small beneath them. I had lived more than five decades, but my life was a nanosecond in their time. Civilization was a little bubble. Those mountains loomed above me like the crests of ocean waves. The forces that had been building them for millennia sometimes shook the city and made the glasses dance on my kitchen shelf and the light bulb swing on its cord.

Every morning I looked at the great still peaks and went on to my work with my staff and my clients. In my mind, we were like the children my brother and I were when we went into the ocean waves and locked our hands together to see if we could stand up as a big ocean wave washed over us. No matter how firmly my brother and I locked arms, sooner or later we were knocked down. My staff and I would do our best, but it would stand only afew seconds in the cosmic scheme of things. You might think it odd I took some comfort in that realization. But after all, it shrunk not only the importance of my work but the importance of my frustrations and failures.

Apart from that kind of comfort and perspective, I have no other explanation for why I like to live in a wild place. Whether the wildness is ocean waves, great mountains, or the stillness of an old forest, it tells me what Lord David Cecil’s father, the prime minister of England, once told him: “Few things matter very much, and most things don’t matter at all.”

THE NOBODY AMONG THE SOMEBODIES

You’ve seen it or you can see it—the way 47 year old, beetle-browed, double chinned Susan Boyle stuffs a sandwich in her face, tells the backstage interviewer she’s ready to sing, then stumps out onto the stage of a nationally televised British talent show. She dares to confront a live audience of mainly young and hip Brits in her nondescript beige dress that covers her thick body more like a tube than a garment. Her sturdy legs protrude from below and terminate in white high heels that she uses somewhat as if they were stilts. If you haven’t watched, please do it now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY


The three judges make a chick sandwich—two tanned unblemished guys flanking a sleek young blonde. Watch the guys snigger as she introduces herself. “And what’s your name, darling?” asks the youngest guy leaning back and playing with his pen. He asks her age and rolls his eyes when she says she is 47. When she says she wants to be as famous as Elaine Page, the beautiful blonde who starred in the debut of Evita, judges and audience faces wince and snigger.



By her own description she was just another Scottish woman living alone with her cat Pebbles, singing in her church choir, never married, never courted, never noticed outside her own circle of friends. Today over 12 million people have watched her sing on YouTube.

What made her an instant sensation on the Internet and British and American television? Not her sure enough good singing voice. Her real triumph was the way she suddenly and decisively smashed and shamed the smug superiority of the three gliteratti judges, the two fay, condescending back stage assistants, and an audience ready to laugh at a bush-browed, sack-of -potatoes woman who dared sing for them in a national talent show.

And what will she sing a judge asks. “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables she announces confidently to the audience that clearly pities the dreamer. Within a few bars not just her voice but her confidence and her identification with the song lift both audience and judges out of their seats. They are applauding and shouting approval. She sings on. The song is everything.

If you don’t know the song, it opens with this stanza:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high,
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.

The last lines are these:

But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms
We cannot weather...

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seems
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

As the applause and screaming approval die down, the older of the two male judges tells her that when she walked onto the stage “and stood there with that cheeky grin and said, ‘I want to be like Elaine Page,’ everyone was laughing at you.” The younger guy says he had been expecting “something extraordinary” and it’s clear he means extraordinarily bad.

Few people, even professional actors and singers, have ever turned an audience around as decisively as this Scottish nobody. And she did it not by acting or performing in any professional sense.

Those judges, theater people, television hotshots, and the hip audience—they all had a dream. Their dream was that they were somebody and other people were nobodies. Many of us dream this to justify ourselves, and most of us know better. Emily Dickinson once played on this theme with her lines:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Susan Boyle proved that inside every nobody is a somebody. Perhaps she reached inside of those frogs and that bog and killed their dreams. But she brought back life to their hearts.

Idealism and Realism: Clarified by Vasily Grossman

I recently upset a friend by writing that idealists have been responsible for many of history’s greatest disasters. “Thank God for idealists,” she replied. My words brought to her mind a choice between hidebound conservatives and optimistic, compassionate progressives; defenders of the status quo and reformers guided by a shining ideal. Maybe Natan Sharansky captured the difference when he noted that it would be unfair to criticize the inventor of the wheel for not having invented the pneumatic tire.

The idealist judges the existing order from the ideal rather than by its past progress or its ability to improve or the flexibility of its institutions. Idealists have often created havoc and suffering in proportion to the urgency and passion with which they insist the world measure up.

I do not contend that there is no safe dose of idealism, but history warns us that the world has been denied a lot of measurable and possible progress because politicians and political movements have chosen to pursue unachievable and often unworkable ideals. Few people have written so well about the dangers of idealism as Vasily Grossman. Here are passages from his huge novel about WWII,Life and Fate.

Whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil. . . . whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always being shed.

I have seen people being annihilated in the name of an idea as good and fine and humane as the ideal of Christianity. I saw whole villages dying of hunger; I saw peasant children dying in the snows of Siberia; I saw trains bound for Siberia with hundreds and thousands of men and women from Moscow, Leningrad and every city in Russia -- men and women who had been declared enemies of a great and bright idea of social good. The idea was something fine and noble -- yet it killed without mercy, crippled the lives of others, and separated wives from husbands, and children from fathers.
. . .
and yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day's work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.

From Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler. Vasily Grossman was born in Ukraine in 1905 and served as a war correspondent in the fiercest fighting between Soviet and German troops. The KGB confiscated what they thought were all copies of his novel.

Elmer Kelton Is More Than The Faulkner of Texas

Hate to say it but I wish novelist Elmer Kelton had not won the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America six times. Very few people know him except the readers of “westerns.” As Dee Brown, the author of best seller Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, said, “Elmer Kelton does not write Westerns. He writes fine novels set in the West.” I would add he deserves the same kind of wide recognition as Faulkner. (Another day I’ll muse on why being a Southern writer is a badge of honor while being a Western writer is a literary pigeon hole.)

Kelton’s genius is the same as Faulkner’s—the ability to see the big picture through a small frame, to see the full scope of human possibility in people few of us ever see. The difference between Faulkner and Kelton is that you don’t need an English professor to give you the illusion that you understand what he writes.

Like Faulkner at his clearest, a Kelton dialogue about some particular gritty routine can open bring into clear and personal focus an understanding of a big issue like the nature of freedom or the role of government or the duties of love without ever stepping out off a fast moving story.

Perhaps Kelton is widely read but seldom taught for two reasons. He doesn’t have a lot of the mumbo jumbo that professors like to play with, and he is not politically correct. A student recently sent me the reading list for an American studies course. It had filled its politically correct diversity quota by having a gay and lesbian writer, a couple of black and Latino writers, and a feminist. All minor writers and message writers rather than good story tellers. With such quotas to fill and given the mentality behind the quota many courses in American literature cannot find a place for anything that seems devoted to the old American icon, the Cowboy.

Suffice to say that Kelton’s Mexicans, women, and Indians struggle with and sometimes enjoy real lives rather than feeling sorry for themselves. They reveal the complexity of race and gender issues in a way only the characters necessary to a believable story can do. Enough said. Kelton speaks for himself and I recommend starting with The Time It Never Rained or The Good Old Boys.

“The way Hewey saw it, the Lord had purposely made every person different. He could not understand why so many people were determined to thwart the Lord’s work by making everyone the same.” The Good Old Boys , p. 52.

That same footloose cowboy tells his established farmer brother, “I can do anything I put my mind to.”
“And your back. . . You’ve never been lazy, Hewey. You could do anything be anything you wanted.”
“I am what I want to be.” , The Good Old Boys, p. 123


Today's link is to a seasonal poem by novelist Amy Belding Brown (Mr. Emerson's Wife):
http://amybeldingbrown.blogspot.com/2009/03/red-winged-blackbird.html