Jon Frankel's Blog, page 17

MY ROOM

MY ROOM

In my room the walls are white

And books are stacked hip high;

A picture of my mom beneath the light

Where Father’s Day presents lie

In a jumble, clay masks and cards

Different halls in different wards.

A room in a house on a block in a city

My single glowing ingot in the kitty,

The ante, the opposite, Uncle and Dad,

This padded posterior of four white walls,

Were not constructed to be had by the mad

But were meant to be mental feed stalls.

So book after book I did put down

Roots that went after rare water

And the room grew larger than the town

And I neglected to look after my daughter.

Town that was a room is an island now

That lies forty miles off the starboard bow.

Biblioklept

Biblioklept wrote a good review of GAHA. Check out the other books. Really amazing stuff.

Grilled Asparagus with Scallops and Mulberries

Grilled Asparagus with Scallops and Mulberries

Some people grow so much asparagus they get sick of it. We aren’t them. Our asparagus patch produces a handful every two days or so. Often it’s just enough to put into a salad. Last week we ate it raw with boiled potatoes. Sometimes I get a few spears and decide to save them until I have enough to cook. It isn’t as fresh but it’s still fresher than anything you can buy in a store. Since I was going to fire up the Big Green Egg, of which I am a devotee, I thought it would be the better part of valour to grill it. Dinner was going to a garlic rich affair, as it so often is. Pasta with garlic and parsley, ocean perch marinated in olive oil, garlic and sage, wilted endive with white beans, garlic and lemon. Why not make a warm salad of grilled asparagus, scallops and a handful of fresh mulberries, black, sweet and rich? Growing amid that asparagus is its outward twin and soulmate, dill. That too would go in the dressing.

1/2 lb sea scallops

1 bunch asparagus

1/3 cup fresh mulberries

3 T chopped dill

2 cloves minced garlic

1 lemon

1/2 cup of olive oil

salt and pepper

Trim the asparagus (I snap it) and save the tough part in the freezer for stock. Dress the asparagus with olive oil, a pinch of dill and a pinch of garlic, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Do the same with the scallops. Let marinade for an hour. get a grill really hot (mine was 600 degrees). Grill the asparagus and scallops until nicely charred. Arrange on a platter. Make a dressing: olive oil, lemon juice, dill, garlic, emulsified with a fork. There should be enough lemon juice and olive to make a good dressing. I like mine lemony. Dress the asparagus and scallops, toss the mulberries over it and garnish with the dill.

Memories of a Country House

 

Memories of a Country House

How did the ghost arrive at this impasse?

Like a blown glance the phantom has no mass.

It comes by watered routes of memory perhaps,

Or by the growing habit of a jonesing synapse.

A game of chess played by Her and Him

On a grid laid out on a gossamer scrim

That gently luffs and waves in a dead calm

And bellies up to the sky to taste the sunny balm.

The ghost that fills the silent sail with rage,

The blow that never came, what is the name?

Whose chest is pressed against the cage?

The one who comes and goes and flaps like a flame

Who halts before the rubble of my faults,

Divides, grows high and turns a waltz.

I LOVE CIGARETTES

Jon and Joan, smoking

I LOVE CIGARETTES

In the ashtray of my mother’s car

Lay my first cigarette, bent

At the filter with a lipstick scar.

The black everpresent omniscient scent

Thrown over the world like a cape

Was cold and stale that day I pushed

The lighter in. I was an ape

Staring at the burning coal. I rushed

To inhale, not knowing that the first gust

Is like burning pitch, that the lungs explode.

Those days I pine for now, those days of must.

A pack a day, twenty blows of the goad

And I’m on my way, yes sir, I’ll serve,

As my mother did who died at 88

Drowning in smoke. She beat the curve.

But me, I quit, who knows, too late.

Anyway, if they ever find a cancer cure

I’m on that line over there the one with the lure.

COMET

Comet

Empty space. A burning face

Arcs in the black embrace

And sheds its flames in a hail

Of voices and faces

The vacuum erases.

MAY EVENING

May Evening

A sharp yellow light paints the blind

And the smell of rain is in the house

The first leaves swishing in the wind

A brawl of hail and a souse

And then the quietus

The ice makes with the sun.

 

 

 

Dominions: Marianne Hauser

Marianne Hauser, age 18

Thanks to Miette, the Marianne Hauser website is up and running, with some content. It is an evolving site. I hope to get others to contribute. From now on my posts about her will be there. If you’ve arrived here looking for Marianne, please go to Marianne Hauser dot com. It is a work in progress, but it will eventually have comprehensive bibliographies of not only all of her published fiction, but of her book reviews from the 1940s. All kinds of stuff is there now. And please, if you’d like to review one of her books, or discuss her life and work, please do. Leave a comment or email jon(at)lastbender(dot)com. I will post any and all legitimate contributions.

Lisa Ben and Vice Versa

VICE VERSA

One of the pleasures, many pleasures, of research is stumbling on the unknown. So, I’ve been reading a bit about the 1940s, trying to Understand the context for Dark Dominion, Marianne Hauser’s first novel in English, published in 1947. WOLFWOMEN AND PHANTOM LADIES, by Steven Dillon is a recent academic book about pop culture and women’s desire in the 40’s, which is right up my alley, and in that book I found a reference to the first lesbian magazine, Vice Versa, hand-typed (with carbon paper) by the editor, Lisa Ben (pseudonym), and given to her friends. Each issue (there were 10 in all) was distributed to about 10 people, who passed it on. Ben has been recognized, lauded, and documented, but I’d never heard of her, and spent Sunday morning reading Vice Versa online. Dillon’s book is absorbing, clearly written and intelligent, so I’m really looking forward to finishing it. I was a bit disappointed that Hauser, whose Dark Dominion is mentioned in it, in a chapter on women’s magazines, some how eludes the index! This is one of the very few critical works to even mention Dark Dominion.

The Living Theater

J & J in Jail

I just found out that Judith Malina died on April 10th. Malina and Julian Beck started The Living Theater in 1947, an iconic institution of the post war, anarchist avant-garde. They grew up in public. The personal, the aesthetic, the political were never separate in their work. He was a brilliant set designer. She was a brilliant director, paralyzed by stage fright. In the early days they were a force of radical creation. They knew and associated with the older generation of modernists, performing plays by William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Picasso, Pirandello, Jarry and Jean Cocteau, as well as classics. They also created their own plays, most famously The Connection, The Brig, and Frankenstein. There was not  a major artist of the post war generation that was not influenced by them. They knew the Beats, the New York School, and Black Mountain writers and artists. Malina’s father was a German Rabbi assassinated by the Nazis. She was arrested many times protesting war. They broke laws, they went to jail and the lived in Exile. Like Patty Smith and Robert Mapplethorp Julian Beck and Judith Malina met when they were young. The late forties was a moment before the explosion: the modern civil rights movement, the anti war movement, liberation politics, queer art, fueled the American counterculture. They were vital figures whose fearless exploration, Dionysian excess, rigorous thought, intellectual, political and aesthetic dissent warped the space around them and defined a world that now recedes in a rear view mirror. By the sixties they would seem old fashioned and unsophisticated by poets like Kenneth Koch, whose plays they performed. They remained young, eternally adolescent but from that fertile ground so much grew. American art would not be what it is today were it not for them, and much that it lacks it lacks because it has turned away from those archaic, explosive energies and towards abstraction, wit, intellect and academia. Malina could never be tamed. She was fierce and true.

John Tytell wrote a great book about them, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage.