This has nothing to do with the Rolling Stones except it’s stone–so there’s that.
I’m listening to Hackney Diamonds the new release by The Rolling Stones as fed to me by Tidal’s FLAC version. It’s stunning considering the age of the performers. I get a little bit of Black and Blue out of some of it, but several of the tracks just rock, straight ahead, ma’am, thanks. I hear a nice big fat and fuzzy bass on “Bite My Head Off” and whaddaya know? It’s Sir Paul McCartney on that one! I like that Keith Richards gets to sing “Tell Me Straight.” Lady Gaga joins them on “Sweet Sounds Of Heaven”…and Mick Jagger sounds just as good at bending a blues note as he ever did. (Reminds me a bit of JJ Grey & Mofro.) Look at the credits for this one! Stevie Wonder on piano? Ronnie Wood on guitar and backing vocals? Keith is playing bass? Oh HALE YEAH! And what a great tribute to their roots at the end of the album: “Rolling Stone Blues” by Muddy Waters, most of it performed with just an acoustic guitar and a harmonica.
When the album was announced, I read that this is the first studio album of original material since A Bigger Bang. “Surely that can’t be right,” I thought. “I listened to a new album in the last ten years or so.” Ah, but that was a bunch of blues covers, not original stuff (Blue & Lonesome, 2016). Shee-it. I was stuck in yet another unsatisfying job in 2005, the year that one came out. I had no inkling I was headed to North Carolina, that two more tension-producing jobs awaited, or that I would score a professional jackpot by entering the consulting world. Eighteen years is a long time, even for old people…like me and the Rolling Stones. (Maybe I should write a memoir called that–except I came to the Stones late.)
Whatever. It’s Rolling Stones Retrospective this afternoon. Streaming Aftermath which starts with these: “Paint It, Black”, “Stupid Girl” [the B-side to Paint It, Black if I recall correctly], “Lady Jane”, and “Under My Thumb”. There are signature movements in the music industry–Big Band, Rock N Roll, Hip Hop–and I’m glad to have grown up with one. Cheers, folks.
A Roman recipe from An Alphabet for Gourmets by M. F. K. Fisher from a collection of her works entitled The Art of Eating:
GARUM (400 B.C.)
Place in a vessel all the insides of fish, both large fish and small. Salt them well. Expose them to the air until they are completely rotted. Drain off the liquid that comes from them, and it is the sauce garum.
Kennedy Fisher, Mary Frances . The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition (p. 901). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
Or perhaps it is the cesspool of death that it appears to be…
what my latest poem looks like on my desktop computer monitor. October 2023.
Something perhaps has changed with WordPress. I’ve been irritated to see that choosing the “Verse” setting for a block, which I thought yielded the above, doesn’t even come close on some devices. Here’s what my friend received in his email:
what my poem looks like on an Android phone, as delivered in a Gmail message. October 2023.
I knew that WordPress converted poetry to a monospaced font, rather liked it actually, because I follow a couple of poetry blogs which deliver the entire poem to my inbox. I’m pretty sure in the past that I saw the same thing on the WordPress website when I used my phone. Ah, but now there is Jetpack, newly changed for the…better? This is what appears on my actual blog when using an Android phone:
What my poem looks like on an Android phone using WordPress/Jetpack. October 2023.
That’s not “verse,” WordPress, nor is it “poem.” That is called “paragraph” and “prose” and perhaps “simplistic crap” unless one makes a living as a stream-of-consciousness author, and even then one must establish a certain cadence and structure to ‘musically’ signal to the Reader that yes, this is something beyond prose. (Unless one is James Joyce, then nevermind.)
Canadian philosopher and communications theory god Marshall McLuhan invented the phrase “the medium in the message”. I’ve perverted what this means. He meant that content doesn’t really matter, that a children’s cartoon or a vicious slasher movie is all the same when broadcast identically on television. To me he meant the message of any communication effort takes its ultimate meaning from the medium by which it is delivered. Spoken words in a living room conversation take on new meanings when sung in a concert hall. More familiarly, books turned into movies tell a different story and cannot help do otherwise. Even if Peter Jackson had managed to control every reference in his Lord of the Rings movies, visual, aural, or what-have-you, the story still would have been just as vastly different than the books as they turned out to be.
For these reasons, it’s deeply unsettling to oldsters such as me to watch the different devices reformat and repackage the content of what purportedly is the same thing. I see this nearly every day as I follow Major League Baseball. MLB.com presents a side-by-side box score for both teams, but on the phone you must select one team or the other–never can you present them at the same time on your phone’s screen. Baseball-Reference.com displays a wonderfully useful tool when looking at any particular season for a baseball team: a histogram of green and red bars which tell the tale of the entire season, game by game, read left to right. Mouse over any bar and it tells you the date of that particular game, who this team played (and where), and what the score was. It also shows what the team’s Won-Lost record was when the game finished. On a mobile device (tablet or phone) this histogram tool disappears. It makes me wonder if certain features of a website are completely unknown to a majority of the younglings who stare into their phones for 90% of the time they’re awake.
Thus, we come back to my dilemma/consternation and the question posed in the headline. Have I delivered a poem at all when it looks like a short paragraph raising an offhand question? Does the trivialization effected by the mobile presentation indicate my poem lacked substance and can only stake a claim to poetry because of its window-dressed arrangement? (Believe me, I’ve thought some unkind thoughts about other’s postings which, if returned to a more prose-like arrangement, look like the musings of a teenager in a diary. Am I just as shallow?) Did McLuhan not go far enough? Does the message ultimately get defined by how the technology delivers it, even when it lives simultaneously in different media formats?
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
Marshall McLuhan from Understanding Media (as quoted in Wikipedia)
Ultimately I think McLuhan would argue each device configuration represents a medium. But I never signed up for this, WordPress! My understanding of the matter was this: you give me the tools to put my message together, and I pay for it by giving you ultimate ownership of my content (which I cannot believe I did, but there ya go). I expected a bit more, though. I expected a very nuanced difference to my content. Sure, I’ll accept McLuhan’s theory that those who read my stuff on a phone get a different message than those who read it on a big desktop monitor, but I would prefer to be left out of the “definition changing” part of the equation. You’ve made me a partner to it by changing my content not just the medium.
Which leaves me little closer to answering my question but has given me an excellent opportunity to rely on that first college degree and to prove yet again that old age clothes old men in curmudgeonly behaviors as surely as dogs become grizzled and oaks gnarled.
Mystifying things sprout in shadows… October 2023.
"You know why I poetry?"
[Excuse me?]
"I poetry because only there
unclamps my scheming, planning,
anal-fixated Self. It can't get
Here, this Here where I poetry.
It doesn't like it though, when
I'm Here. Can you
hear the screaming?"
Things that have been bouncing around in my head lately:
What’s wrong with these directions from a recipe I used this morning? “Sift before measuring: 2 cups flour.” Seriously, Joy of Cooking? How do I sift 2C without measuring it first? (The waffles were delicious, however.)
I’m trying to be on a stay-cation while my wife travels to Florida. This means I don’t want to do “chores” — but I reminded myself that “even on vacation, one has to pack the trunk.”
One of the all-time best blues-rock (Chicago style) performances is Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s “Dance For Me Girl” on Live in Chicago.
“Attaboy, Harper!” Jesus, don’t poke the bear, Arcia. That’s just basic Survival 101. As if Bryce needed more motivation!
I’ve realized recently my emotional IQ hovers around “special needs”. Unfortunately, my intellectual IQ makes me think I’m the smartest person in the room at all times. In terms of roulette, smart people think that just because it comes up red 98% of the time, it will always come up red. So, 2% of the time they’re wrong. Unfortunately, we never know if “this time” is in the 2% or not.
Getting old sucks.
I will need to be institutionalized if my wife dies before I do. There’s only so much crazy society can tolerate. (Our current politicians notwithstanding.) I’ve been alone for four days, and I remember how the internalized thoughts and lack of social contact distill the craziness. Not pretty.
Those of you with big families have no idea the paucity of having few (if any) relatives. I have/had one uncle, four cousins, and one brother. Grandparents died, the uncle died, one of the cousins has died. My brother had two children–one is estranged to the point of “whereabouts unknown”. My close family consists of a brother and a niece. My wife, meanwhile, has seven siblings, and 23 nieces and nephews, and her parents are still living. Those nieces and nephews have had a good handful of children. It’s night and day here in my house.
I daily lament not “getting to the important things” and then spend the afternoon reading, cruising the Interweb, and drinking beer. And writing posts like these. Not one important thing is addressed.
Johnny boy, he's always propping up the bar
He sees life crystallized through his jar
He says he only lives for beer
But deep in his heart is a cry of fear
Give me a heart to hang onto
Give me a soul that's tailored new
Give me a heart to hang onto
A heart to hang onto
--Pete Townshend, "Heart To Hang Onto" from the album Rough Mix with Ronnie Lane
if you’re going to post poetry as if you’re a poet, for God’s sake, learn the damn language! It’s pretty easy to do that and still write bad poetry, but it’s impossible for you to write good poetry without a basic understanding of grammar, usage, and mechanics.
I’ve just completed reading My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman. He’s the one who wrote A Man Called Ove which was made into the movie A Man Called Otto with Tom Hanks recently. It’s a tear-jerking adult fairy tale of a book which skirts the edge of formulaic, contains frequent self-referential passages (which I find tiresome), tells a well-worn tale without breaking any new ground,…and I gave the book a five-star rating. For one thing, I like a pathos-riddled book which adroitly brings tears to my eyes. Mainly, though it’s for two other reasons I gave it those stars. The book re-taught me a lesson about reading (and therefore about life a bit): when you dislike a book (or a person or whatever) because it isn’t what you thought it was going to be, then you’re not disliking it for what it is, you’re disliking it for not living up to your expectations. If those expectations were based on very little, as most of our snap judgments tend to be, then it isn’t the book’s fault. In this case, my expectations were built upon some not-very-specific blurbs which said what the book was ‘about’. I expected a different storyline. Once I accepted it wasn’t going to follow my imagined plot, I realized I liked the book very much. (Had I not, I would have put it down, but with the acknowledgement that I did so based on what it was rather than what it wasn’t.)
Since the blurbs I read led me to expect a book where an adult protagonist runs around Europe delivering letters from her now-deceased grandmother, here’s my blurb, only slightly more accurate and still very vague:
When the grandmother of the “almost-eight-year old” protagonist dies, the granddaughter is charged by her Granny to deliver a series of letters to people from her grandmother’s past. Through this device, Backman weaves together the competing narratives of being someone’s hero and being a shit, and teaches a young, precocious girl that Truth (and Life) lie somewhere between the two. Oh, and along the way he makes a good case for forgiveness and tolerance, fairytales, loyalty, courage, and that anyone can redeem themselves and become a hero.
Me
Other than that, I liked the book for its style which led to some lovely little quotes:
“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 89). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.
Children know that time is just an emotion, so “now” is a meaningless word to them, just as it was for Granny. George used to say that Granny wasn’t a time-optimist, she was a time-atheist,…
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 231). Atria Books. Kindle Edition
Because life is both complicated and simple. Which is why there are cookies.
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 368). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.
I wish there were more quotes, but I became too involved in the novel to take time to highlight them. I’ve been gifted some alone-time what with my wife gone for a week, which led me to read hours yesterday and today, which I do too seldom much as I did before adulthood. (True, many would argue about calling me an adult, but I’ve shook them from my boots like the clods they were and kept walking.)
And now, because all posts deserve a photo, here are the mushrooms I’m going to sauté in an hour or two. After the fiasco of the first kit, my purveyors made good with one which burst forth in just seven days and has yielded these fully ripe, ready-to-harvest golden oysters in just 11 days:
Golden oyster mushrooms, at Day 11 + 5 hours. October 2023.
all the voices in my head 