1. It's such a densely packed presentation that I'll take an hour sometime and listen to Helen Vendler's lecture on Keats' "To Autumn" again. Helen Vendler not only explores different structures at work in the poem (very illuminating), she takes us into Keats' mind, into his other odes, into the debt he owed to other poets, especially Milton and Spenser, and into her study of other writings he left behind, including drafts of "To Autumn". In her lecture, Helen Vendler illuminates certain things that Keats assumed we'd know about when reading his poem, including the topography of an English farm and the Greek and Roman myths that inform his work. Helen Vendler's knowledge is encyclopedic, her sensitivity to the many movements in Keats' ode is exquisite, her ear for echoes between Keats poems astonishing, and her understanding of how John Keats translated the workings of his mind into tropes, figures, images, and poetic structure is remarkable. (This video is not posted on YouTube, but if you enter Helen Vendler Keats To Autumn in your favorite search engine, look for a URL that begins kaltura.uga.edu.)
2. In his poetry broadcast today, Billy Collins introduced us to the legendary live 1953 concert of The Quintet at Massey Hall in Toronto. The quintet featured Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Charlie Parker (sax), Charles Mingus (bass), Bud Powell (piano), and Max Roach (drums). These five giants of jazz never performed together again, but fortunately this performance was recorded and the album is readily available for our listening pleasure. On the poetry front, Billy Collins read two poems by Raymond Carver ("Happiness" and "Cobweb"), two of his own poems ("And His Sextet" and "My Life"), and closed by reading Ada Limon's poem published in 2018, "A New National Anthem".
3. When Debbie made green tomato curry the other night, I made a big pot of brown rice and we had about two quarts left over. Tonight, Debbie asked me to make a Thai curry, not only so we could eat some of this rice, but because she was hungry for it. She specifically requested that the curry include potatoes.
No problem.
I heated up a two tablespoon plug of yellow curry paste. I chopped up an onion, a couple of potatoes, a zucchini, and a piece of fresh ginger and I got out a bag of green beans. I mixed coconut milk, soy sauce, fish sauce, and brown sugar in a bowl and poured it over the paste and the vegetables in the Dutch oven and stirred it up. I then added fresh basil and cilantro to the curry.
I slow cooked the curry sauce on the stove top until the onions and potatoes were soft.
It worked. We had a great dinner.
Here's a limerick by Stu. It's National Tarzan Day!
Created by Edgar back when.
Had a yell which caused fear among men.
Could use vines in the trees,
To cruise the jungle with ease.
And believed Lady Jane was a TEN!
No comments:
Post a Comment