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On top of her many talents and sweetnesses, Lesley is one of my best friends. Weswey, I bestow upon you the You Make Me Smile award!
On top of her many talents and sweetnesses, Lesley is one of my best friends. Weswey, I bestow upon you the You Make Me Smile award!
One of the reasons I want to memorize poems is to understand allusions when I hear or read them. For this reason, I'm going to start with poems that are in the western poetry "canon." Old English is beautiful, so melodic. So I'm going to start with Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes," (above) a sensual, lyrical poem that is SHORT!
The bookmark I'm using is a postcard of Picasso's 1919 painting Les Amoureux on display at le Musée National Picasso, Paris.
Pamuk is the Turkish author who won the 2006 Nobel prize for literature. His life is threatened, he feels, after he was arrested last year for breaking Turkish Article 301 , the law against “denigrating Turkishness,” when he publicly criticized the Turks for their part in the WWI-era mass killings of one million Armenians as well as 30,000 Kurds in the 20th c. (which Turkey officially denies). Merely mentioning the “genocide” is against this Turkish law. To not be offensive, you’re supposed to call it the “Armenian question.” Charges were dropped against Pamuk in January last year, and sometime this year he moved to New York in self exile.
He moved partly because of the January 19, 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish newspaper editor, for his frank writing on the same topic. Pamuk felt threatened by the same Turkish nationalist group to which the 17-year-old who killed Dink belonged.
So, the other day I bought a Glamour magazine in line at the grocery store, and after I got home and stared at some revenge dressing and tummy flattening photos, I found an article about Elif Şafak (or Shafak), another Turkish author whose life has been threatened by the same Turkish nationalist group that killed her friend Hrant Dink and threatened Orhan Pamuk. (Look here for some stories about other inspiring women. I’ve also added the Global Diary link to my sidebar.)
Like Dink, Şafak wants Turks and Armenians to reconcile, but she understands it won’t happen until Turkey acknowledges what happened in 1915.
What does it mean to be Turkish anyway? In 1985-88 when we lived in Istanbul our lives straddled Asia and Europe: we lived in Asia and Lesley crossed the Bosphorus bridge every day to her British school on the European side of Istanbul, and Don did much of his export business from the European side. Turkey’s culture straddles Asia and Europe philosophically too, as there is a constant tension between conservative Muslim traditions and modern European trends as Turkey tries to become part of the European Union. I’m currently reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk (still, I know, I know, I started it in July), a novel about Turkish women who are torn between traditional Islam and modern Western womanhood, represented by wearing, or not wearing, head scarves, which have been banned in some public Turkish places.
Şafak’s 2006 novel Bastard of Istanbul is on my list of books to read. It’s about gender and cultural identity of Turkish, Armenian and Turkish-American and Armenian-American women, and the violence of their past. The world is changing fast, and books like this help me understand some of it.
Şafak, Dink and Pamuk risked their lives to tell the truth as they understand it.
My freedoms and lifestyle cost many people a lot. And yes, I know our rights as US citizens have been in question, especially since 9/11. But for the most part, we don’t get arrested for speaking our minds. I think Constitution Day is a good day to remember that.
Hours weeding: 0 (Don did weed once, but it wasn’t for an hour.)
Hours tending: 0 (I think. Don, did you tend?)
Quarts of grape juice: 13
Jars of grape jelly to come: 150 (hours expected to make the jelly: 4?)
We won’t eat enough toast or peanut butter & jelly sandwiches to consume it all ourselves. Want some? We'll gladly give you some.
We might also sell some at our upcoming yard sale in October. What would you pay for a jar of home grown organic homemade grape jelly? At this Web site it’s $5 for a 10 oz. jar. We don’t expect to get rich, but the empty jars cost about $1 each, and sugar and pectin another 50¢ each. We were thinking $3?
Maybe we'll have our first roadside farm stand! If you stick with us, this might turn into a little farm economics lesson.
But in case you were wondering, we’re not in it for the money.
Madeleine L’Engle died Thursday at age 88. She was born the year after my dad, two years after my mom. I read only one of her children’s books, the most famous, the science fiction A Wrinkle in Time, for which she won the Newberry Award in 1963.
The heroine of this book, Meg, is given time and space travel powers to rescue her scientist father on another planet via the tesseract.
I’ve been thinking about tesseracts for the last few days. Well, not exactly tesseracts. I’ve been thinking about doorways and pathways to be kept open.
I was talking yesterday with Inge about not being as interested in poetry as in photography. “Maybe I’ll stop going to Sapphos” (my poetry group), I said. And she said, “Why decide that? Why close the door? If you say, ‘I’ve stopped writing poetry’ on such-and-such a day, then a couple of weeks later, when you’re inspired to write one, you might say to yourself, ‘Oh, no, I decided I wasn’t going to write poetry any more.’”
Madeleine’s imagination kept doors open.
Douglas Martin in the NYT writes today that she called herself a French peasant cook, who drops a carrot in one pot, a piece of potato in another and an onion and a piece of meat in another.
"'At dinnertime, you look and see which pot smells best and pull it forward . . .The same is true with writing,' she continued. 'There are several pots on my backburners.'"
Thank you, Madeleine.
The purple pole beans have pulled down the weather vane. He's buried, I can't even show him to you, the little sawyer. But here is an old picture before the onslaught.
And poor Phoebe is drowning in basil.
What is there to do but make pesto and take some to Sapphos tomorrow night for pasta, place a nasturtium blossom on each plate for garnish, share the beauty and bounty with my lovely poetry writing friends?
Oh, and I'll freeze some too, pesto that is.
There is a satisfying sadness at the end of summer. I'm trying to write a poem about it, but it's difficult to put into words.