ANN'S REAL WELCOME HOME

the cats seem to be indifferent when just one of us is gone. w/one still around, the routines are still in place & they seem content. however, when the missing human returns they inevitably receive feline affection usually unseen during our everyday situation. merce is the one who leads in this respect. when i've been gone, the first few days after my return are filled w/her insisting on me holding her in my arms while i sit at the computer. it's something i couldn't FORCE her to do otherwise but for a few days, she's very affectionate.
here, merce is doing something she's NEVER done before. she's not really a lap-cat but ann's been gone for 10 days & that changes everything.

ANN'S WELCOME HOME MEALS 2

CUBAN ROPA VIEJA("old clothes")& CHEESE & BEAN FILLED FRIED TLACOYOS W/CREMA & RED & GREEN SALSAS. GREEN SALAD

ANN'S WELCOME HOME MEALS 1

FRESH MASA TAMALES FILLED W/PORK, CORN, & MUSHROOMS W/MANCHAMANTEL("tablecloth stainer")SAUCE & SALSA VERDE. QUESO COTIJA. GREEN SALAD.

END OF DAYS PART 3

GOURMET MAGAZINE. 1941-2009, RIP.

the fact is ruth reichl HAD taken the magazine places it didn't need to go & that may have been one of the many reasons why the magazine is being deep-sixed. a couple of issues ago, the main spread had pics of folks who looked like the outrigger crew of hervey & jay & sean, hipsters all. at the time i thought to myself, "what in hell is that woman(reichl)thinking putting these folks in the magazine?" if she was that off the mark w/aesthetic strategy, i can't imagine she had ANY idea of the economic strategies needed to keep the enterprise afloat.
bottom-line, of course, is economic & the advertising dropping by over 50% was the final nail in the coffin. i will say that i did cook out of the magazine. when i was at the nyingma institute, responsible for 2 vegetarian meals a day 6 days a week for seven years, ANY ideas were welcomed. sometimes the magazine was just too precious & sometimes it just went right over into foodie pretension but i usually found sometime in every issue that worked.
i'd say saveur magazine & the art of eating quarterly will benefit from gourmet's closure. some folks thrived even during the great depression.

JACK KEROUAC MEETS WOODY ALLEN

someone got clever. that's ok. i think this works just fine. it's good to actually hear kerouac reading from his book & allen's great cinematic homage to the city is as good as movies get. all w/o explosions & severed heads & naked torsos(tho i have nothing against naked torsos).

enjoy.

THOMAS WOLFE b OCTOBER 3 1900

"So, to Ben dead was given more care, more time, more money than had ever been given to Ben living . . . And as the wind howled in the bleak street, and Eliza wove a thousand fables of that lost and bitter spirit, the bright and stricken thing in the boy twisted about in horror, looking for escape from the house of death. No More! No More! (it said). You are alone. You are lost. Go find yourself, lost boy, beyond the hills." —T. W., Look Homeward, Angel

as i read, james ellroy hasn't written a sentence of "lush, luxurious" prose in his life but especially in his newest book, blood's a rover. stacking paragraph after paragraph of declarative sentences w/an occasional slang tweak for the hipsters isn't lush. it isn't luxurious. it's deadly repetition. it doesn't crackle & shoot sparks because droning facts can't be made to do that. the book reads like a coked-up beatnik manque hooked on conspiracy theories dictated it into a tape recorder.

i think most all of us read wolfe back in high school, even the web and the rock & you can't go home again. i can't think of any writer(maybe james agee) who loved words & story telling more than wolfe. his type of digressive story telling certainly revealed his southern roots & his prose revealed his christian upbringing. THIS is lush prose. THIS is writing that luxuriates in the simple acts of composition & communication. THIS is writing that can still make me shake my head & wish i'd written it.

"And with the echoes of his mothers's voice, that had seemed to fill all the days of his childhood with its unending monotone, there returned to him an immediate sense of everything that he had ever known: the front porch of the old house in Altamont where he had lived, the coarse and cool sound of Black's cow munching grass in the alleyway, along the edge of the backyard fence, the mid-morning sound of sawn ice out in the hot street of summer, the turbaned slatterns of good housewives awaiting noon, the smell of turnip greens, and upon the corner up above, the screeching halt of the street car, and the sound of absence after it had gone, then the liquid smack of leather on the pavement as the men came home at noon for dinner, and the slam of screen doors and the quiet greetings; and, inside the house, the cool stale smell of the old parlor, and the coffined, rich piano smell, the tinkling glasspoints of the chandelier, the stereopticon of Gettysburg, the wax fruit on the mantel underneath its glass hood, and he himself reclining on his father's couch, buried in a book, his imagination soaring with Hans Grimm, and with thoughts of witches, a fair princess, fairies, elves, and gnomes, and of a magic castle on a rock."


From the short story The Return of the Prodigal

WALLACE STEVENS b OCTOBER 2 1879

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.
A RABBIT AS THE KING OF THE GHOSTS

perhaps the oddest of the great american poets of the 20th century, he worked a vein of american romantic transcendentalism that was truly his own claim. it took a while for me to fully inhabit stevens' world but when i did, i couldn't see anyone else(w/the exception, maybe, of hart crane) near to creating the interior space of a world that allowed full exploration of the questions that matter most to us as a dying species. oddly enough, i've been reading him again while ann is away & i am still in total awe of his creativity & generosity.