Well, do you love me, now that I can dance

The story goes:  Berry Gordy

was so anxious to record this

extremely strange song, right 

away, that he grabbed the first

group he ran into in the hall,

and said, Like, OK, now, you do

it. Mashed potatoes recur, in a

constant refrain having to do

with whether one likes it like

this; and I had always prized

Mr Porter for being silly. But

billions of this thing are in

print; I mean billions, rush-

ing down to the sea as we speak,

videos of it streaming all over.

I was motoring down our little

Constitution Highway, only yes-

terday - the part musing past

Somerset Plantation, whence you

can see fuh absolutely evah -

I couldn't get this crotchety, 

nagging lyric to go away. It 

started shaping the tongue, de-

forming the lips, invading the 

ear, can you stand it. It then

came over me, the whole thing

is involuntary; it flies under

the radar of criticism, avoid-

ing cognition, itself, hence

its ridiculous persistence. I

could see why he'd be so impa-

tient to get it out there, as

its writer. There wasn't any

time to book The Temptations;

and so The Contours got it -

as you must have heard.

Berry Gordy, Jr.

Music and Lyric

Do you love me?

Motown, 1962©

Saturday commute xlviii: Down to the language lab

A healthy musical culture is one in which

the creative function, the function aris-

ing from a strong and prevalent love of 

music, is the primary one, and in which 

the activities of the composer, the per-

former, and the listener .. are in their

several ways embodiments of that love.

It is obvious that real love for music, 

as for anything else, depends on inner

security; but it is also true that inner

security depends on the strength of love.

The style of structuring these 
pre-requisites changes all the 
time, but in their necessity 
they do not. I reflect upon 
necessity in the terms with 
which I learned of it, and 
did my best to live up to it. 
And this - I don't know - does 
this count anymore: a vision 
one could believe in, embodied 
all about one, to vindicate? Is 
it really useful to know how to 
say, petit verdot, if it is shaped on the vine and harvested as if it were something else?

                                 

   

Roger Sessions

The Musical Experience of

  Composer, Performer, Listener

op. cit. 


i   Jeremy Young

ii  Vine photo, TPF

The disaffected scion and the importance of important days

Chef Thomas

A lively dissonance in this portrait of the ill-manicured, workmanlike hand's settling upon the pure-shot clavicle of natural elegance, suits the occasion of a discussion of obligation and resistance, and the difference between manipulation and learning. From these points of view, the gesture becomes so much one of reclamation that I hope a reader will forgive my not putting forward an intimate portrait from a family of my own, because it doesn't exist. I know all one could want to know about the vitality of disaffection with ostensibly important holidays, yet none of that information could possibly contribute to its crisis management. I would draw this, instead, from the common principle of three misconstrued chefs ~ Waste nothing. 

Mindful of Will Hunting's snarky challenge, Let the healing begin, one doesn't think in those terms, or even of reconciliation. Little could more inflame disaffection, than the common effort to suspend it pro tanto and gain no understanding that it is all right. The doctrine of waste nothing is derived, in fact, from a dismembering process, and goes, rather, to the appreciative celebration of every fragment. I like its relevancy.

The important days are every day, and define the chef's answer to the falsity of eliciting a recalcitrant youth's collaboration in what is, from his perspective, a one-day farce, possibly even a parody of appetites gone awry. Thomas Keller is deeply on to something, in his brief essays on killing a rabbit, trussing a chicken, and cooking offal. The same is true by cultural definition in Daniel Boulud's almost Rilkean Letters to a Young Chef, and in Gabrielle Hamilton's poetically pragmatic inadvertent education of a reluctant chef, but Chef Thomas's are the arguments which ring through to our case. I never did ask him, but they seem to come from Melville's rendering of the whale, not The Bear, not Hemingway. There are circumstances where gastronomy is superior to tragedy, unless they really are the same thing.

They give the youth a justification for coming down from Truman Capote's pecan tree, which challenges none of his pain or anger, none of his opinions of folly or form, but goes directly to the thing he plainly prizes the most, his personal nourishment. They give him the experience of pity without self-implication; they give him a model of caring rooted in his most accessible qualities - craft, feeling, play; and they give him a sense of participation with natural conduits - the ingredients of the feast - in the contribution he has found himself unwilling to make to those he distrusts. Engage him in the carcass of the occasion; let his pride be shown to him.

Ultimately, the important days are important days from his perspective. It's nice, if he can be enlisted in the proper address of form, in the pursuit of behaving properly under stress. But he gets that at school, and we have seen the limits of those expectations at home. These are the days when caring for him is put to its most stringent test; the days when he needs the most to know what that means, and to inherit the essence of it, to do the work, himself. The rest can and will come later. But this, this is all you ever wanted.

One day, I asked my rabbit purveyor to show me how to kill, skin, and eviscerate a rabbit. I had never done this, and I figured if I was going to cook rabbit, I should know it from its live state through the slaughtering, skinning, and butchering, and then the cooking. The guy showed up with twelve live rabbits. He hit one over the head with a club, knocked it out, slit its throat, pinned it to a board, skinned it - the whole bit. Then he left.

I don't know what else I expected, but there I was out in the grass behind the restaurant, just me and eleven cute bunnies, all of which were on the menu that week and had to find their way into a braising pan. I clutched at the first rabbit, I had a hard time killing it. It screamed. Rabbits scream and this one screamed loudly. Then it broke its leg trying to get away. It was terrible.

The next ten rabbits didn't scream and I was quick with the kill, but that first screaming rabbit not only gave me a lesson in butchering, it also taught me about waste. Because killing those rabbits had been such an awful experience, I would not squander them. I would use all my powers as a chef to ensure that those rabbits were beautiful ..

Thomas Keller

  with Susie Heller and

  Michael Ruhlman

The French Laundry Cookbook

  The Importance of Rabbits

Artisan, 1999©

Everyman a pilgrim

    

   

    I give thanks

    for the company.

A reader on his birthday

.. saw a large flock of wild geese, right overhead, not very high up, ranged in V-shape, in relief against the noon clouds of light smoke-color .. Queer thoughts melted into me the two or three minutes, or less, seeing these creatures cleaving the sky - the spacious, airy realm - even the prevailing smoke-gray color every-where, (no sun shining) - the waters below - the rapid flight of the birds, appearing just for a minute - flashing to me such a hint of the whole spread of Nature, with her eternal unsophisticated freshness, her never-visited recesses of sea, sky, shore - and then disappearing in the distance.

They did not make it up, Preacher and Billy Bob; it was not because they didn't want to, it was only that there did not seem to be any straight way for their friendship to happen again. But they couldn't get rid of this friendship: each was always aware of what the other was up to; and when Preacher found himself a new buddy, Billy Bob moped around for days, picking things up, dropping them again, or doing sudden wild things, like purposely poking his finger into the electric fan .. But then, and though it was a cold winter day, he went in the backyard and climbed up into the pecan tree, crouching there all afternoon in the blue December branches.

There is no closing of the book, on the formation of the flock in flight or on the crotch of the pecan. I have nothing to give any reader but gratitude for his company in these places where we all are found, high and low, and to two of the purest, clearest springs in New World letters, to wish for any friend love on his birthday - and mirth, because it is our way. 

  

Walt Whitman

Specimen Days

  A Hint of Wild Nature

1892

Justin Kaplan, editor

Walt Whitman: 

  Complete Poetry and 

  Collected Prose

Literary Classics of

  the United States, 1982©

Truman Capote

Children on their Birthdays

1948

The Complete Stories of

  Truman Capote

Truman Capote Literary Trust

Random House, 2004©

Meticulous

            

        

Well begun: a tumblr

on seeing and selec-

tion, a gallery of a

distinct heart -

Driving Satisfaction

Sailor

You wouldn't want to have to sit and listen

To the soft voice of the cithara telling you stories

About the long wars against the fearsome Spaniards,

Or Hannibal the tough, or how the sea

Near Sicily ran red with Punic blood,

Or about the Lapiths and the wine-crazed Centaurs,

Or how by the punishing hand of Hercules

The Sons of the Earth were tamed, the Giants who caused

Old Saturn's shining house to quake with fear.

Maecenas, you'd be better able to tell

Straightforwardly in prose stories like these,

About the triumphs of Caesar and about how

Chained by the neck once-dangerous kings paraded

Disgraced along the streets of jubilant Rome.

Instead of this the Muse wants me to use

The peaceable music of my cithara

To celebrate Lycymnia's shining eyes,

Lycymnia's wit, Lycymnia's lovely singing,

Lycymnia's faithful loving marital heart,

Lycymnia dancing with such seemly grace,

Lycymnia joining hands with the festal band

Of maidens on Diana's sacred day.

..

Horace

Odes, ii.12

David Ferry, translation

op. cit.

Come, sweet rain

       

  Had no other chore 

  presented itself 

  to language, than 

  to make allusion 

  memorable, would 

  language have 

  resorted to au-

  thority, or to 

  desire? Would a 

  good opinion of 

  an ironclad coup-

  let, say, in Pope, 

  have held without 

  internal power; do

  we marvel at what

  it holds, or that

  it floats?

The blueness of the hour 

when the spine stretches itself into a groan, then the golden cheek 

on the dirty pillow, wrinkled by linen.

Odor of lanolin, the flower

pressed between thundering doubts of self, 

cleaving fresh air through the week 

and loading hearts to the millennium. 

Go, sweet breath! come, sweet rain, bewildering as a tortoise 

embracing the Indian ocean,

predictable as a porpoise

  diving upon his mate in cool

  water which is not a pool.

Frank O'Hara

Sonnet

  Angel Hair 6 

  1969

Donald Allen, editor

The Collected Poems of

  Frank O'Hara

op. cit.