Peg Duthie's Blog, page 64

dancers in Durham

I went to a Charanga Carolina concert yesterday, in the American Tobacco District. It was a good time, in part because it was fun to watch terrific dancers getting their salsa and merengue on:





And then, at the Durham Bulls game, the grounds crew showed some moves as well:



:-)

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lorem ipsum dah dah dah

[Via Katherine Murray's Microsoft Word 2010 Plain and Simple, page 12] I recently learned that you can type =lorem() in a doc to generate placeholder text.

[Via my publisher] I've also learned that if you're coding a webpage and you want something more contemporary, Samuel L. Ipsum is ready to help.

Finally, a splendid site: Daily Drop Cap. The list of categories starts out with "Badass," "Botanical," and "Circus," and oh! look at this "E"!

eeeeeee!

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j'écrivais, j'écris, j'écrirai

I saw this house on a walk a couple of months ago. While I'm nowhere as into architecture or home decor as many in my circles, I'm occasionally fascinated by the variety of materials and tools -- what's available pre-cut or pre-assembled, the frames and bones that are so necessary and so invisible if the job's done right...

Anyway, I also keep thinking of this snapshot when trying to sum up the year so far: under construction. under construction. under construction. I have three main lists right now: Before Road Trip, During Road Trip, and After Road Trip. It was already obvious by the beginning of this month that the "During Road Trip" list is ambitious enough for a half-dozen trips.

I am reminding myself of Conditions of Enoughness. Among other things, there are over twenty specific poems I'd like to draft, revise, polish, and submit during this trip. But it's even more important to shake the stale fluff out of my mental attic, rather than finishing pieces for the sake of having pieces in circulation. The poems will find their readers when I allow myself enough time to let them bloom, even if I miss the deadlines for the original markets.

And, speaking of poems:

7x20 featured "Stuck" this morning.

"Reckoning with Wreckage" received an honorable mention in a contest at The Dictionary Project. (They kindly provided some helpful feedback in the notice, so it's one of the pieces I'll be tucking into the travel folder...)

Issue 18 of Spillway includes my poem "Not Your Honey."

(For those of you who like hearing about publication paths: I first drafted this in January, for a contest with the theme of "Encounters." It wasn't selected as a finalist, so I then submitted it to The Pedestal; the poetry editor for the issue in question contacted me a week later to see if I'd be okay with her publishing it in Spillway instead. [Which highlights the issue of "fit," which I have encountered several times elsewhere this year -- i.e., submissions that were near-misses not because of quality but because they just didn't gell with the other poems the editor had selected for the collection in question. I think (judging from what I glimpse on forums and the like) that many writers aren't aware of how much effort editors invest in the shape and flow of an issue -- that their job isn't merely to select the best poems and stories, but selecting the best pieces that happen to complement the other pieces they will be featuring. And this is a useful reminder to myself, when I'm sulking yet again about not getting shortlisted for x or included in y, even though I know damn well that my odds of placing more work will go up substantially when I simply finish more work and send it out (and do so as many times as necessary). The piece that isn't quite right for A may be perfect for what B might be planning. Funny, that.]

This just in (via Mary): Belle DiMonté assesses The Moment of Change (now available as an e-book, btw!) and finds it "beautiful and transcendent in every sense." [The collection includes my poem "The Stepsister."]

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Vivian Swift, on liver pâté

Quatre épices -- four spices -- is the name for the six spices that give chopped liver its gourmet credentials: pepper, coriander, nutmeg, ginger, clove, and allspice. It's alchemy the way they combine to unleash liver's latent characteristics (I taste evergreen, and sea-spray) to offer a meaty, nostalgic adventure for the taste buds.

The flavors are so much more mischievous than anything I normally tolerate. With each bite, I taste velvet dresses I've never owned, poems I should know by heart, the life I might have had if I'd been born on the Ile-de-France instead of Montana.

-- Le Road Trip

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pickles and wine

Two food notes for the Nashville folks:

* If you're at the Tomato Fest this weekend, you might want to check out Pickle Me This at Booth 105. Yummy stuff (...and, fwiw, Sarah Wilson sez eating fermented stuff is good both for your immune system and for kicking sugar cravings)

* The cabernet sauvignon by Beachaven (Clarksville) is darn nice. (The zin, though, is too sweet for most people's tastes.) And if you're into jazz, they have a lawn concert series going on

I got to sample both the pickles and the wine at a dinner this past Saturday night hosted by my friends Tanya and Lannae and their families. The theme of the dinner was locally produced foods, and it was a fundraiser for my church (i.e., the seats were sold at the auction last fall -- so, we have been looking forward to this for months).

I didn't take pictures, but you can see many of the dishes at Lannae's writeup of one of the tasting/testing dinners. What I remember sampling:

* the pickles (including turnips and grapes)
* gazpacho
* cantaloupe wrapped with prosciutto
* tomato-mozarella kebabs
* ETA: cheese board (I ignored this in favor of the fruits and veg)

* watermelon agua fresca (I think). The beverage offerings also included Yazoo beer and some other local brews, but the wine was enough for me.

* brisket
* bread w/butter
* pasta with Benton's bacon bits and veggies
* a very elegantly arranged ratatouille
* cucumber salad

* berry-crumb bars
* three variations of basil-lemon ice cream, garnished with sugared mint. The base for the ice cream is the recipe for Jeni's, which Lannae and her man still blame me and Tanya for getting them hooked on.

(Plus, the company was excellent. The conversations included church stuff and caregiving, working on films and houses, traveling to India and France and Belgium, skydiving and triathlons and soccer matches...)

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Here Where I Now Live

(subject line and inspiration from Luisa A. Igloria's Memo)



This summer, everything greets my eyes as messages
curling away from the bottles that brought them.
I swallow letters instead of writing them down,
slide along walls in unhemmed sarongs. I
could blame my unshed weight on the heat --
how it drenches both bones and brain with fatigue
as thick as old curtains, as sad as old stockings,
and how it roosts in abandoned chairs and vandalized nests --
but it's been winters in the building. The breaking
of my clutch-hold on the trash that cannot save me --
it's taking place one line at a time,
my fingertip tracing the shadows on your back
cast by the sun's insistent surge through our blinds.

- pld

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from Vivian Swift's LE ROAD TRIP

On Amazonian BBQ:

God knows what was on that grill. "Is that an ear?" I asked the cook. "Yeah, sure," he said, so shiftily that I began to worry that ear could be a euphemism for something even more unthinkable. That's when I learned that there can never be a good answer to the question, Is that an ear?

(I just started reading this book, and I am already charmed. Though I also now want to write a poem-scene in which there is a good answer to the question in question. *cheeky grin*)

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pockets of togetherness in the middle of the night

From a New York Times article about Brooklyn Muslims staying up through the night during Ramadan:

On the quiet streets, there are pockets of togetherness. Arab-style coffee shops stay open until 4 a.m., each capturing the feel of a different Middle Eastern country. For teenagers, there are stoops and street corners, and a Greek-owned family doughnut shop that opens at 3 a.m., to give them a place to eat just before the fast begins again at dawn.

...By 3:15 a.m., as some older men drank coffee outside the cafes, a trickle of young teenagers in T-shirts and track pants began to materialize out of the darkness. Jon Kanatarellis, the morning man at Mike's Donuts across the street from the mosque, was ready for them.

His family-run shop, around since 1976, normally opens at 4 a.m. but opens an hour early during Ramadan. "Out of respect," Mr. Kanatarellis, who is not Muslim, said as he laid out the trays of shining doughnuts glazed with chocolate and vanilla icing and decorated with sprinkles. "They are kind of like family."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/nyregion/celebrating-ramadan-in-new-york-between-fasts.html

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lipstick on shabbat

I'm currently recording A. J. Jacobs's Drop Dead Healthy for the Nashville Talking Library. My most recent session included the chapter on how to be smarter, which advocates changes in routine, which includes this bit about shabbat:

There's a tradition in Judaism that on the Sabbath, you should do things differently from the rest of the week. I once had an Orthodox Jew describe to me how she took this edict to mean that even lipstick should be applied in a new way — counterclockwise instead of clockwise. And this small tweak reminded her to focus on how pleasing the putting-on-lipstick ritual can be.

(Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/how-to-be-smarter-7974617#ixzz21pxaPwML)

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back in the lettering saddle

From work

I've been working on a calligraphy commission the past couple of days. I am rusty, but my nibs are not.

I also went to a yoga class tonight; the last one I attended was in March, I think. So you could say that a theme of this week has been dipping back into practice.

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