Peg Duthie's Blog, page 33

a best part of my day

hello, tomato plant ...



how you like it here
inside my house
with the lily and the peppers
and long sips of water
with occasional shots
of tea and coffee

so do I
oh so do I



Prompted by April Moon 15 Day 13

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consider the cats on the kitchen counter

...how they toil not, neither do they spin...



It was the larger one whom I accidentally kicked off the bed twice last night (I'm used to cats sleeping on me rather than near my feet), but there seem to be no hard feelings, as he's now licking my left foot. The smaller one didn't think much about me bringing the camera out:



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boo, yay, yah

Boo:
* two rejections (eight pieces total) this week
* missing yoga classes to meet deadlines

Yay:
* current management at my pharmacy very friendly
* Soyung Pak's Dear Juno (picture book about an American boy and his Korean grandmother exchanging letters. Boy with dog, gran with cat. (Longtime readers may remember that I'm a sucker for picture books with cats snuck into the spreads.) Illustrated by Susan Kathleen Hartung.
* colleagues grinning at my peacock-patterned galoshes
* forty-minute swim yesterday, some of it with a lane to myself

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Carpe Diem

The temperature dropped last night, but the peppers, radishes, lettuce, and poppies seemed to have survived. The yards are full of violets and I'm especially enjoying the yellow tulips. As I drove along Woodland Street yesterday afternoon, I glimpsed a group of young women walking toward Five Points; they had paused in front of a house with phlox spilling over the front border, and one of them kept bending down toward the flowers.

A horse named Carpe Diem (bred by Coffee Pot Stable) won the Blue Glass Stakes yesterday, and is a favorite for the Kentucky Derby. (Not the same Danish gelding sired by Richard of York, or the US gelding sired by Grand Slam, or the British mare sired by Good Times, or the Brazilian mare sired by Ski Champ.) If I make any straight bets on the Derby, though, odds are I'll choose an underdog -- perhaps the other likely Pletcher entry, Materiality.

In the meantime, there are horsies everywhere. Including at Scout's Barbershop:



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"She should feel free to stop writing poetry at any time."

The subject line is from a March 1958 letter written by Henry Rago, then editor of Poetry, to Aileen G. Melchior, who had asked him to give her "an honest appraisal" of her twelve-year-old daughter's poems. Her letter opens with "I don't understand traditional poetry very well and modern not at all. I am not familiar with your magazine however I have been told that you are one of the most astute judges of modern poetry in America," adding that "it would a tragedy indeed if the child had talent which I failed to recognize."

In his reply, Rago repeatedly cautions Mrs. Melchior against "over-encouraging": "I was a child-poet myself, and I know that she can do justice to her talent and at the same time have all the fun that any child should have. She shouldn't be deprived of this -- even poetry isn't a good enough reason."

The daughter, Julia Anne, replied to this with a thank-you note:

... as for writing poetry, I don't write, I just put words together and they come out poems.

I don't know if I'll be a poet though, Mama says there's no money in it and I do want to eat. I really do love words, especially adjectives. They seem to know how to describe exactly what you're feeling.

[quotations from Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters]



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from the There's a Poem in This folder

Michael Kimmelman, in a November 30, 1997 NYT review of Jenny Uglow's Hogarth:

This extravagantly detailed biography by Jenny Uglow is less a book of art history than a history of Hogarth's milieu. Much of his character, and the book's, is encapsulated in the colorful story Uglow recounts of a woman named Mary Tofts, who claimed to have become so obsessed with rabbits after failing to catch several of them in a field she was weeding that she suffered a miscarriage and began to deliver animals and animal parts. Fashionable medical men verified her story, among them a certain Nathanael St. Andre, a Swiss who was Anatomist to the Royal Household and a teacher of fencing and dancing before he took up surgery, who announced that he had personally delivered her of several rabbits.

This put Londoners off rabbit stew for a while. Then Mary conceded the hoax and St. Andre was forced to make a public apology. It was the sort of ripe event that Hogarth, like any tabloid cartoonist today, couldn't resist: absurd, bawdy, a perfect opportunity to skewer self-proclaimed experts like St. Andre and his fellow quacks, and also to strike a blow against mystification, which Hogarth despised in all forms, whether from doctors or politicians or art critics. His print "Cunicularii," or "The Rabbit Warren," sold briskly.

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bears and vanaras, rock by rock

As do all other weeks, this week has had its share of derps and dammits and disgusting nightmares (trashed-to-the-rims bathrooms to clean -- thanks, Subconscious of Zero Subtlety). But, as with all weeks, there have been pleasures and blessings, including:

Iced tea and a Kentucky Hot Brown at Madeline.

Sanjay Patel's Ramayana: Divine Loophole. (The link will take you to an entry at Book Scribbles, where Jen posted some photographs from the book, including the bears and vanaras building a bridge rock by rock.)

My friend Knight won Gannett's Innovator of the Year Award.

She and several other Nashvillians invite you to Girls To The Moon, a one-day "campference" this September for girls (ages 8–13) and their parents/caregivers.

My mama pepper seems to be enjoying its new pot. (Now to cover it and all the other plants properly before this weekend's cold snap...)

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TOASTS - a giveaway

My eighty-something Mama Nancy is legendary in many circles for many reasons, including her joie de vivre. Within the family, part of the legend is her readiness to pour champagne in honor of any occasion that can be construed as cause for celebration.

I think of Mama Nancy as I look at the cover of Toasts: The Perfect Words to Celebrate Every Occasion, an anthology to which I contributed two pieces, including this offering for the Fourth of July:

Here's to everywhere we're from and everywhere we'll be,
To miracles that brought us together in this country.

Graduations are on the horizon, as are reunions and numerous other special occasions. Would you like to add this book to your reference shelf, or to the bedside table in your guest room? You have two options:

(1) Comment below with an occasion you are looking forward to celebrating.

Tuesday night (sometime after 8 p.m. CDT), I will collect all the entries from the Dreamwidth, LJ, and IJ threads, put them into an ice bucket, and ask either my partner or my dog to fish one out. If you are the winner, I will contact you for your address (U.S. only, sorry), to forward to the publisher. Viva Editions will ship your complimentary copy directly to that address.

(2) You can purchase the book from Viva, Powell's, Malaprops, and other vendors.

Santé! Slainte mhath! :)

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strowe aboute, strowe aboute

Paperwork and housework call. But I didn't go home right after church, for there were orchids to ogle:







And also small statues in bamboo gardens...



... and daffodils on display, including one named Trigonometry:



More snapshots here

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so glad of thy gladness

[Subject line from Swinburne's "March: An Ode," via Dawn Potter]

[Speaking of Ms. Potter, I read Galway Kinnell's "For Robert Frost" during lunch two days ago. It begins, "Why do you talk so much / Robert Frost?"]

There is paperwork that must be conquered, but the sun was shining, so there was snipping and lugging and sowing. Four cubic feet of garden soil (plus maybe another half-foot left over from the fall) doesn't go all that far, but it made for a solid start. I transplanted my mama Christmas pepper plant (the one that spawned these) and spice-jar tomato seedling into larger planters, and sowed the following:

Evergreen scallions (seeds from Hudson Valley Seed Library, via All Seasons)
Hungarian breadseed poppies (Renee's Garden, via [I think] the now-shuttered Worm's Way Nashville) -- I've never gotten these past seedling stage, but maybe third time + larger pot will translate into success
chives (Plantation Products quarter packet, via Nashville Public Library Seed Exchange)
Jade Gem lettuce (Renee's Garden, via Worm's Way St. Louis, source of the terrific tomato plants)
petite marigolds (Ferry-Morse, via NPL Seed Exchange)
Grand Rapids lettuce (Bean Acres Seeds, eBay)
Rainbow radishes (Seeds of Change, Turnip Truck)
arugula (Seeds of Change)
Dainty Marietta French marigolds (seeds harvested from last fall's blooms, which were from a 2013 eBay purchase)

Now I am chilling out with a tumbler of Pisco Capel and a library copy of Soul Food Love. I am boiling rice in chicken broth for the dog (who was trying her darnedest earlier to hoover up the soil that didn't make it into the pots), and later I will cook shrimp grits for the BYM.

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