A Bit of Verse

Faith Has Been Broken

We’re all dancing to shattering glass
Muffled screams, unseen blood --
Arterial red against pale skin, already scarred.
Someone’s laughing from the corner table,
the wooden one made from an old barn door,
Initials and hearts carved in it and a jagged, knife-penned statement:
And you thought you knew the answer.
And more piercing graffiti:
Fuck them all.
You can’t help but agree.
But we’re dancing now and you’re aren’t thinking about anything;
you’re lost.
You hear the words to Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,”
They couldn’t drag you away.
The mirror behind the bar reflects hundreds more bottles
-- Crème de menthe green, Curacao blue, syrups raspberry dark --
Glossy glass cracks reality in this fire yellow light.
Spinning together, movements complementing and familiar,
We ignore crunching bottle bits under our shoes;
For it’s now in this moment and
time looks like forever at the event horizon.
But the juke box quarter runs out
And I know atoms split outside black holes
and even light can’t escape.
You look up, and
as you catch sight of yourself in the mirror, your eyes say
Drag me away.

--C.

Kissing the Blarney Stone

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

The St. Patrick’s Day I was in kindergarten, I searched for leprechauns in my backyard. I thought I might actually find one on this particular St. Patty’s Day. The air misted and hung gray; any green growing after the winter snow was bright and promising. At school, we ate green Jell-O shamrock cutouts my mother had made, and my teacher told us she had seen a leprechaun during her morning drive. My teacher was a tall, brown-haired woman whose favorite color was purple. Once she yelled at me for speaking too loudly in answer to a question she asked from across the room. She laughed about me “yelling” at her with another teacher later. I overheard them. I resolved never to wear purple to school or smile at her again (yes, we Irish, even at 5-years-old, know how to hold a grudge). When she told us about the leprechaun, though, I wanted to figure out if her story were true. A rainbow had actually appeared that morning because of the fog, and I had desperately sought the end of it from the car window as my mother took me to school. When I got home that afternoon, I put on my raincoat and took my little brother outside to search for leprechauns. We didn’t find any. We did, however, discover signs of one: a patch of moss spreading across a tree stump and some orange mushrooms growing next to it. For the rest of the afternoon, we watched the stump from the kitchen window hoping to see a leprechaun appear.

No leprechauns today so far, but I’ve been thinking about my Irish grandmother. She died only a year after our leprechaun search, and so I didn’t get to know her as well as I wish I had. But one of my favorite pictures of her was taken when she visited County Cork, Ireland, from where her family came. The Blarney Stone is five miles from Cork, in Blarney Castle, and the picture is of her lying upside down to kiss the stone. Kissing it is supposed to gift you great eloquence, a charming power of words. My grandmother loved to read, and even though she never received a college education, she read as much as she could. I’d like to think I inherited her love of books. So I’m wearing green in memory of her.

--C.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry "Caesar!" Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear.

Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.

Caesar: What man is that?

Brutus: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

...

Caesar: The ides of March are come.

Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

--C.

When All Else Fails

“Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. It is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.”—Baron Justus von Liebig

Rosemary mint. Wasabi and ginger. Coffee. Curry. Pomegranate. Blueberry. Cacao nibs. Orange. Pear. Lavender and cloves. Chili and cinnamon spice.

These are just some of the flavors of chocolate we’ve been discovering and tasting lately. Some come in bars with names like Xocolatl, Black Pearl, Fire, Refresh, Sexy, and Pleasure. Others are more literal; Earl Grey, Citrus and Chili, Salt and Pepper. Most of these can be found at one of our favorite chocolate shops—Biagio. The place is like a jewelry store for chocolate bars; it’s impossible to walk out of there in a bad mood. Just below street level, the store is easy to pass if you don’t know better. But once you do know, you won’t be able to help yourself. Every chocolate lover in the neighborhood frequents this place.

It’s a cold and dark winter Tuesday evening. A man in cycling gear stands by a shelf and quickly chooses several chocolates. Another customer studies the two different chocolate bars in her hands, then sets one back on the shelf.

“I’ll get that one next week,” she says.

The door jingles and a young woman wearing a brown knitted scarf enters. She walks straight to the counter.

“I’m trying to remember which chocolate my boyfriend likes best,” she says to the clerk. “His name is Scott.”

The clerk, a woman with curly white-gray hair and a strong New York accent, seems to know who Scott is; at least she takes the younger woman over to a shelf and points out different bars. One of her suggestions is a chocolate bar flavored with sea salt. This may sound strange, but it’s pretty fantastic. Think sweet and salty combinations. There’s also salt and cracked pepper. Last week we came across a peppercorn-flavored bar, though we opted for another with rose and ginger instead. It tastes like rose petals and reminds me of the perfume my Ukrainian relatives would bring as gifts. Strangely enough, the combination of spice and flower is quite good.

Soon I’m the only customer left. Of late, I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect chili-and-cinnamon-spice chocolate bar (ancient civilizations in Mesoamerica—the Olmec are thought to be the first—made the first chocolate and flavored it with chili spices; the Aztec called their rich chocolate drink xocoatl, which Hernando Cortez brought to Spain and sweetened with sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves), so I ask the clerk what she recommends. She approves of my choice of Christopher Elbow’s Dark Spice bar. When I also ask about a raw 100 percent cacao bar, she suggests I try the store’s best seller: Pralus of France’s 100 percent cacao bar . She breaks off a piece for me. I’ve never tried chocolate made from 100 percent cacao before; the closest was a 99 percenter R. and I found the other month. We enjoyed it, but the bar was sort of powdery and took some time in your mouth before its flavor and texture could be appreciated. The Pralus bar, though, was creamy with subtle fruit and flower flavors. Let’s just say we’ve since purchased several of them.

The most interesting thing about trying different chocolates has been discovering how much flavor pure chocolate contains. Chocolate from different countries and continents tastes of a variety of flowers, fruits, and spices—it all depends on the soil in which it is grown. Because of these nuances in taste, savoring a quality piece of chocolate is similar to sipping a fine wine. And having synesthesia adds color to the subtle differences; for instance, I see a lot of soft reds and pinks with the Madagascar chocolate bars we’ve been trying. The Pralus bar has a kind of bluish gray in it. The rose one actually evokes a lavender hue.

I have to mention one more chocolate lover’s stop in the nation’s capital: AC/KC. The best thing about this place is that you can order rich hot chocolate in different flavors named after “The Divas.” I keep ordering the Lucy—a cinnamon-and-chili-spice concoction that takes its name from the fiery redhead of comedy. There are also the Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, and Eartha Kitt. R. ordered the lavender-infused Liz Taylor last time. We’ve also tried the Ginger Rogers, which contains dried ginger and wasabi.

The next chocolate bar I plan to try is salted caramel. Or maybe another spice-flavored bar. Or maybe a rich xocoatl drink. There are worse addictions.

—C.

Marilynne Robinson's Home

The snow is still here, dirty and piled on the sides of the road. Lawn chairs and ironing boards stake out parking spaces. Neighborly shoveling and snowbound parties have turned into shouting matches and threats. Driving to work is an obstacle course of potholes and lanes that end in snow mounds. The one good thing about the longer commute is that I have more time to listen to a recording of Marilynne Robinson’s Home.

My feelings on Robinson’s third novel are mixed. (I should note that I have not read Gilead, to which Home is a companion.) When I first started listening to Home, I worried that not enough was happening in the present action to keep my attention, especially because I was listening to it rather than reading it. However, the Virginia Woolf–like meditations on place and people soon drew me in, and the novel took shape as an intense interaction between a brother and sister who haven’t seen each other in twenty years. The relationships among the characters, who include an ailing father, give momentum to the book's thoughtful and deliberative telling. And while the tension and emotional awkwardness sometimes make the story painful to listen to, they demonstrate Robinson’s skill in storytelling.

Now that I am closer to the end of the book, though, I am feeling a little tired, not of the characters’ pain so much as the many scenes of the father’s sermon-like opining on his son’s twenty-year abandonment. Perhaps part of my irritation is that the reader of the recording attempts to imitate an elderly man’s voice that is extremely grating and strained. The father, the Rev. Boughton, has too much to say to always be heard in such a voice. We’ve also heard his emotionally painful introspection several times. These lectures finally build to a crucial scene that explains more and pushes the story past the bounds in which it has so far remained. The scene is a relief for the reader—before this moment, so much is still unsaid and unexplained.

Home’s brilliance is Robinson’s portrayal of the characters. They are complicated in their sins and good intentions, and while I don’t always like them, I do care what happens to them. In both Housekeeping (her first novel) and Home, Robinson reveals her characters layer by layer so that by the end of each book, the reader realizes that one of the main characters is much further from mental stability than it at first seems. The recognition is kind of horrifying. In the case of Home, we get Jack, a well-read, clever, and intelligent middle-aged man who has struggled with alcoholism and keeping a job. We know he has stayed away from his family for two decades, but the true fragility of his mental state does not emerge until later in the novel. More and more he seems to be living in a reality suited to an angst-riddled teenager. Both novels turn out to be portraying characters for whom homelessness is home; Robinson depicts an almost imperceptible line between stability and instability, between having a home and surviving as a drifter. For Jack, alcoholism is merely a symptom of a seemingly innate sadness and loneliness his father says he has displayed from birth. It is also connected to past events, but the novel seems to be saying that Jack’s lack of place, his separateness, his rejection of his family’s help and love, is inevitable.

I am nearing the end of Home and waiting to see how this sense of inevitability plays out. It’s been a few years since I read Housekeeping, but I remember feeling as if it contained a kind of magical realism. By the end of that story, the realization of homelessness seems almost surreal, and I wondered if I’d read the book completely wrong. Home feels more grounded and because of this, is more emotionally affecting.

—C.

And Auchincloss and Zinn, too.

I'm not sure why writers come and go in groups, but they do. Bloomsbury and the Left Bank and New Journalism brought the world great groups of writers, and this week, Salinger and Auchincloss and Zinn leave together. Maybe it has something to do with apartments in Heaven and the need to find amicable roommates, in which case, god speed, God, good luck with J.D., but as intrigued as I am by Salinger's Pynchon complex, and the possibility of 14 (!!!) or more unseen manuscripts in that safe, Zinn and Auchincloss may be lesser known, but it seems hard to say lesser writers, so let's not forget to crack the spine on an old copy of A People's History of the United States or one of Auchincloss' presidential bios (at least for me, that's how I came to know his writing) as well as that underlined, annotated Catcher in the Rye.

As Thompson once wrote, "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

Selah.

So it goes.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010, "Who Wants Flowers When You're Dead?"

J.D. Salinger died yesterday at the age of 91. In many ways, as R. remarked, it seemed as if he had already been gone for many years: his reclusive life included locking out the world from any new writing. I wonder what we would have gotten to read had he continued to publish, had he written for his readers rather than for himself (as he reportedly claimed). It will be interesting to see if any of his later writing becomes public. The New York Times had an informative piece about him here.

When I read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, it was, not surprisingly, the titular passage that stuck with me most:

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

As R. said, take Catcher or Nine Stories or Franny and Zooey off the shelf, and read Salinger at his best.

—C.

Image courtesy of boston.com