Ruth's comments (member since Sep 02, 2007)

Ruth's comments from the Constant Reader group.

I have a garlic allergic friend, too. What a tragedy.

My daughter has gone nutzo the last year exploring her Italian roots. She's making Thanksgiving this year and just sent me her menu.


AntiPasti: capponata

Primi Piatti – Spaghetti All-Ubriaco

Secondi- Tacchino con limone aglio rosmarino
Ripieni di riso, salsiccia e finocchio

Contorni - verdure arrosto

Fine Piatti - Radicchio, pera e finocchio Insalata con l'anice e arance spogliatoio

Dolci - Torta di zucca con burro, bourbon e noci pecan

Drunken spaghetti (cooked in wine)
Turkey with garlic, lemon & rosemary stuffed with rice, fennel and sausage

roasted veggies

radicchio, pear and fennel salad with orange and anise dressing

pumpkin pie with butter, bourbon and pecans


I'm not being allowed to contribute anything but the caponata.

Actually, Gabrielle, I was sick in the night later. I sure hope it doesn't mean I've developed an allergy.

William Matthews's poetry has earned him a reputation as a master of well-turned phrases, wise sayings, and rich metaphors. He is sometimes identified as a member of the "deep image" movement, along poets like W. S. Merwin, James Wright, and Robert Bly. Poets in this school often tend to allow one strong image to dominate each poem and to evoke many strong feelings and associations.

Much of Matthews's poetry explores the themes of life cycles, the passage of time, and the nature of human consciousness. In another type of poem, he focuses on his particular enthusiasms: jazz music, basketball, and his children. His early writing was free-form and epigrammatic, and considered derivative by some critics. But as his career has progressed, he has adopted a more formal structure and garnered growing praise. Writing in the Bloomsbury Review, Christopher Merrill identified Matthews as "one of our most alert and engaging poets." (Poetry Foundation)

The title of this poem is deceiving. It's not about music. It’s about butterflies. As many of you know, no doubt, Nabakov was an ardent lepidopterist.

Nabokov’s Blues
by William Matthews

The wallful of quoted passages from his work,
with the requisite specimens pinned next
to their literary cameo appearances, was too good

a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t,
why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered
and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood

at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read
and look, you could be happy a month in that small
room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen:

he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble
to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel
apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly

of his back and the small wedge of face that shows
brims with indifference to anything not on the page.
The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light

over the page, too far away for us to read.
We also liked the chest of specimen drawers
labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians,

“Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials
the thousands he examined for his monograph
on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues.

And there in the center of the room a carillon
of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been
three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there,

and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue
(Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov),
a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak,

an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak,
the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida:
in the series Nabokov did on this beauty

he noted for each specimen the altitude at which
it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say,
“and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower

was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt
it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita,
The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues

flew by, and we improvised a path through cars
and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow
to wherever we went next. I must have been mute,

or whatever I said won from silence nothing
it mourned to lose. I was back in that small
room, vast by love of each flickering detail,

each genital dusting to nothing, the turn,
like a worm’s or caterpillar’s, of each phrase.
I stood up to my ankles in sludge pooled

over a stopped sewer grate and thought—
wouldn’t you know it—about love and art:
you can be ruined (“rurnt,” as we said in south-

western Ohio) by a book or improved by
a butterfly. You can dodder in the slop,
septic with a rage not for order but for the love

the senses bear for what they do, for detail
that’s never annexed, like a reluctant crumb
to a vacuum cleaner, to a coherence.

You can be bead after bead on perception’s rosary.
This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the way
desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core:

just as you’re having what you wanted most,
you want it more and more until that’s more
than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.

William Matthews, “Nabokov’s Blues” from Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991. Copyright © 1992 by William Matthews.

Thanks, Barb. We may have the issue lying around here someplace. I'll look for it.

Thanks, Barb. It sure was good.

I listened to Serena as an audiobook. Didn't like it much at all, to tell the truth.

Dottie and I were true to our intent. We had dinner at the Brussels Bistro in Laguna last Sunday. I had my mussels simple--white wine and garlic. Dotty and my husband Leif had them with tomato and pernod. Dotty's husband Jim had stew--which must have been good, he licked the platter clean.

My mussels were delicious. Unfortunately so were the pommes frites which accompanied them. I'm afraid I made a pig out of myself.

Norwegian also has some of those compounds. But actually, they make it easier. If I don't know a word, I just make it up and often I'm close.

I probably would enjoy those descriptions now, Gabrielle. Back in my callow youth they were just verbiage cluttering up the stuff between sex scenes.

Heehee. He'd have hated me. I would had to have asked him, "Mr. Cleese, who the heck are you?"

I am impressed, Sibyl.

I probably was in my 20s when I read Lady Chatterly. I found it hard going and nonshocking and I did so want to be shocked.

Given my experience with Lolita, I probably should try LC again.

Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought it was funny.

I must admit, I read it way back when it first came out. I was only 20, and dying to see what all the scandal was about. Went through at warp speed, looking for salacious bits, was disappointed and bored.

When I read it again, just a few years ago, I was amazed by how much the book had changed in the interim. This time it was funny and smart, and beautifully written.

A short way into the book, I almost put it aside. Shoot, I thought, are we never going to get to the appointment? But reading further I was caught up in the crosstown journey.

If I've read this before, I don't remember, Jim. Thanks for posting it, and your mini-analysis. It is indeed a nice one. But it's also one I need to think on.

I am totally, totally impressed however, that you know the writers of the Itsy Bitsy.

We saw Chinaman a few weeks ago, Jane. We liked it a lot, too.

A couple of nights ago we watched Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. I'd never seen a Spike Lee film. Just didn't figure I was his demographic. But I really like this a lot.

We read this as a CR selection quite a few years back. I wonder why we don't have it in the archives.

Am I the only one who found this book funnier than heck?

I think it would be a good one for the next list, Sherry. I'm going to start a file right now so I don't forget. The ending leaves a lot of room for discussion.

I'm usually not much for the second person POV. My reaction is usually either: Who me? I didn't do any of this. Or I feel as if I'm listening to a conversation between two people, and I'm not included at all.

That said, I really liked getting into the head of this kid.

Now that you mention it, Beej, it is such a one-sided story, we could almost talk ourselves into taking everything the kid said with a very large grain of NaCl.

This is a book that will haunt me. I picked it shortly after HM won the Nobel, because I’d never even heard of her, let alone read anything by her.

The Appointment starts out with a young woman summoned to an appointment with the Romanian secret police. We soon learn this is the latest in a long series of these appointments, and this time she’s packed her toothbrush and towel. She leaves so early there is no possibility of her being late, and as we follow her on her way she muses about the past—about why the police are so interested in her, about her father’s infidelities, her friend shot trying to escape, the slimy investigator assigned to her case, her first husband who caused her grandparents to be deported. Meanwhile the tension builds.