Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 26

Northwest Hot Dogs

Promised a well-deserved shout out last night to Harry & Carol White of Northwest Hot Dogs, who serve the best BBQ pork sandwich I’ve had in Portland, or pretty much anywhere else. The dogs aren’t bad either, and I was sort of in the business.

Jerome in His Study with Coolidge

Sam Lohmann puts Joos van Cleve back together with Clark Coolidge’s “no ekphrasis but in weird background things” poem, “Jerome in his Study,” from Solution Passage.

Recessional

“Historically, timber, wheat, and fish dictated that Portland would be a commercial and transportation center. Economy and society in Portland developed logically from this base, producing a comfortable, if somewhat provincial, service-oriented city. Thus spared from many of the social effects of late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century industrialization, Portland was consequently denied the benefits of a more diverse population and a more heterogeneous economy.”

—Marshall M. Lee, Winning With P

Foundations

“These floors of ours call for some explanation but certainly no apologies.”

—Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Ornamentalism

Nada Gordon’s had a great pair of posts about the ornamental, conceptual, and plain-spoken in poetry, and the consequences they have for the practice of writing conceived as an allegory of living. I left a comment on her post “ornament is neither functionless nor superfluous,” a response to a provocative insight by Ross Brighton. The exchange got too long for the space of a comment box, and might attract other responses here, so thought I’d paste it below. Nada’s original post is here. In the co

Insistent Guest Blogger Dept.: "The Sub That Ran Aground"

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Hoover's Farm

Paul Hoover dissects the shift from farm—no credit cards, one restaurant visit a year, chicken blood flowerets, and a national army the size of Sweden’s—to “internal exile” in the land of strip malls and oil wars using only a single lifetime.[image error]

Suggestions from the Oracle at Delphi

Don’t go to the Web for disjunction.[image error]

House Band (Recession Special)

I wouldn’t have thought Jimmy Fallon’s new house band could be an occasion for thinking about art’s place in the arcades of capital, but Drew Gardner did:

“That sound inevitably disappears into the music of a car commercial, and then reemerges just as fleetingly from the other side of the wormhole. One thing is for sure—we missed something. It could be argued that being paid to bookend chunks of dull schlock in this way is questionable, but it is equally possible that these alternative hip-hop fr

His Urdu

Today I wish I were Habib Jalib.[image error]