Saturday Morning Cereal: H.D.

from "The Walls Do Not Fall" by H. D.

excerpts from [4]

so I in my own way know
that the whale

can not digest me:
be firm in your own small, static, limited

orbit and the shark-jaws
of outer circumstance

will spit you forth:
be indigestible, hard, ungiving,

so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,

selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.

excerpts from [8]

but if you do not even understand what words say,

how can you expect to pass judgement
on what words conceal?

[18]

The Christos-image
is most difficult to disesntangle

from its art-craft junk-shop
paint-and-plaster medieval jumble

of pain-worship and death-symbol,
that is why, I suppose, the Dream

deftly stage-managed the bare, clean
early colonial interior,

without stained-glass, picture,
image or colour,

for now it appears obvious
that Amen is our Christos.

excerpt from [33]

let us not teach
what we have learned badly

and not profited by

[39]

We have had too much consecration,
too little affirmation,

too much: but this, this, this
has been proven heretical,

too little: I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide;

they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned

to hatch butterflies. . .

poets.org: H. D.

Friday Night in Boston: Love + Butter

Frying under the radar
At Love+Butter supper club, dining is a covert experience

By Janice O'Leary, Globe Correspondent | November 28, 2007

There's no sign on the door, there are no business cards near the entrance, and there is no phone number to call for reservations. You may dine there and never learn the names of your hosts. But that's all part of the mystery.

Love+Butter is an underground restaurant, or supper club, as it calls itself, the first in this area. It's not listed in any dining guides, and all the advertising is word of mouth. But those who have eaten there give this illicit venture and the chefs who run it top ratings.

For years diners on the West Coast have been scrambling for invites to underground restaurants, where local chefs take off their toques to cook in a small setting without the limitation of having to cater to public tastes. Other cooks also got on board, creating illegal supper clubs in their homes, friends' homes, even, in one case, a bus on the beach.

Love+Butter does not take place in a bus on the beach, happily. It's in a private home, where on weekend nights you can secure a seat at a table for six by making an online reservation. Unless you book it for yourself and five companions, you'll be seated beside a stranger. But by definition, the other guests are typically interesting and add to that sense of discovery. Love+Butter provides only water, so it's strictly BYOB, which wine lovers appreciate. There is no set charge for dinner, but rather a suggested "donation" of $45 per person in cash, with a discount for students or those working at nonprofits. Interested diners go online to see the five-course menu one week in advance. None of the courses are set in stone. Special requests such as fish instead of red meat, or restrictions because of allergies can be accommodated.

The underground spot has no license to operate, nor has the Board of Health inspected it, which means it risks being closed down. In California, one underground restaurant, Digs Bistro, was busted and shuttered, but parlayed its success into a legal business just last month.

While the air of secrecy does add spice to the experience, having a restaurant in a home means that the duo who run this place are both cooks and servers. As a result, some things are downright homey. Flatware isn't replaced after each course, and diners pour their own water. As for decor, crates of books line the walls. Think graduate student housing, only spotless.

The venture isn't a moneymaker.

"It would take one creative accountant to find profit in this," says one of the chefs.

So why do it?

For love. The love of good food and feeding others, they say. But also for a more sentimental reason: their love for each other. They wanted a project that would bring them closer. "We have very different professional lives," says one half of the duo. "This was a project we could do together." And they simply enjoy cooking for others. "We were feeding people long before this."

Making a meal in their tiny kitchen might test the tightest relationship, but for these two, harmony rules the house. On one visit, while they prepped for the night's meal, one had sent small rounds of dough to the oven, hoping they'd bake into puffy little cakes, but they flattened and spread into a thin, crispy layer of brown. They tasted it. Not bad, but not what they wanted. No worries. The other chef remixed the dough with more flour and tried again.

While the two cooked, there were no recriminations, no sighs of exasperation. It might have been a lesson for kitchens and marriages both.

Their food philosophy is the popular one these days, buying local and organic whenever they can. A farmer brings them grass-fed lamb, which is tender and flavorful, prepared four ways: lamb's tongue with beets becomes an appetizer, set on Chinese soup spoons with herby pesto. The entree is fashioned from peppered lamb loin, braised lamb shank, and seared lamb belly.

"Each muscle is distinct," says the half of the duo who used to be vegetarian. "With several cuts of [lamb] we can put all kinds of cuts on display. It becomes an act of discovery."

A lineup of dumplings, vegetables, and rabbit broth for a second course is the only clunker in the mix. The dumplings are undercooked and a tempura carrot has lost some of its flavor, although the golden crust is a model.

The third course is Spanish mackerel fillet with two potato pancakes and white gazpacho with chorizo. "The only food I've had in Boston that's better than what these folks cook is at L'Espalier," announces one of the guests.

Amuse-bouches - tiny mouthfuls - punctuate the meal, such as an apple fritter with a crisp outside and springy inside, offered with a shot glass of apple essence and a palate-cleansing spoonful of salty-sweet cucumber jelly over preserved-lemon ice.

A fourth course, called "Herbs & Spices" on the hand-printed menu, includes an unusual trio, beginning with a tablespoon of Greek yogurt topped with rosemary sugar, a buttery cookie with juniper icing, and a bay-leaf gelatin cube, all with vastly different, yet compatible, textures and flavors. "We wanted to pay attention to each flavor - rosemary, juniper, and bay leaf," says one of the chefs, "in isolation and then unite them."

The final dessert course includes spiced cardamom bread with orange and lemon rind, ice cream dotted with pieces of preserved bergamot (the citrus that flavors Earl Grey tea), and a warm slice of pumpkin.

After dinner ends, the chefs answer questions about the menu. The two are smart, thoughtful, and quite shy. There's no denying that what they do, they do for love.

Love+Butter might smack of a certain elite foodiness if the meals weren't so carefully and cleverly prepared. And the secrecy is fun. Who doesn't want to give a smart answer to colleagues wondering what you're doing this weekend or be able to bring a date to a restaurant no one knows about?

Alas, there's no receipt to prove you were there.

(Who needs a receipt?)

Charles Simic: The World Doesn't End

(untitled, page 5)

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.

Poets.org: Charles Simic

spencer tunick

A few years ago I came very close to posing for spencer tunick. The event was within driving distance in Cleveland, Ohio. I signed up online. I tried to talk my friends and colleagues into joining me. At the last minute, with no trusted sidekick, and cold weather on the horizon, I wimped out. A pity. Tunick images trip my synapses. Check him out.

The Unofficial Tunick Page

Tunick's Web Page
sign up for the next event!

Saturday Morning Cereal: Marianne Moore

"If something is appropriate, I appropriate it."
Moore quoted by Rotella as transcribed in my lecture notes, Oct. 10, 2007

"his by- / play was more terrible in its effectiveness / than the fiercest frontal attack."
from Moore's "In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance is Good And"

"Reserve is a concomitant of intense feeling."
Moore quoted by Rotella as transcribed in my lecture notes, Oct. 10, 2007

"There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious / fastidiousness."
from Moore's "Critics and Connoisseurs"

"What is / there in being able / to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of self-defense; / in proving that one has had the experience / of carrying a stick?"
from Moore's "Critics and Connoisseurs"

Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it, / the situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly, / what one says of it is worthless."
from Moore's "Picking and Choosing"

"To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough. "
from Moore's "England"

"It comes to this: of whatever sort it is / it must be "lit with piercing glances into the life of things"; / it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it."
from Moore's "When I Buy Pictures"

"it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing"
from Moore's "A Grave"

"But why dissect destiny with instruments / more highly specialized than components of destiny itself?"
from Moore's "Those Various Scalpels"

"The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease. / Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best."
from Moore's "Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like"

"Pastoral" by William Carlos Williams

WHEN I was younger

it was plain to me

I must make something of myself.

Older now

I walk back streets

admiring the houses

of the very poor:

roof out of line with sides

the yards cluttered

with old chicken wire, ashes,

furniture gone wrong;

the fences and outhouses

built of barrel staves

and parts of boxes, all,

if I am fortunate,

smeared a bluish green

that properly weathered

pleases me best of all colors.

No one

will believe this

of vast import to the nation.

NYT Ten Best Books of 2007

Read the NYT article appearing
December 9, 2007 in the print edition:
The 10 Best Books of 2007

Titles are linked to NYT Sunday book reviews:

Fiction

MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.

OUT STEALING HORSES
By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. Graywolf Press, $22.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END
By Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown & Company, $23.99.

TREE OF SMOKE
By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.

Nonfiction

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq's Green Zone.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95; Vintage, paper, $14.95.

LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Bantam Books, $22.

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday, $27.95.

THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History.
By Linda Colley. Pantheon Books, $27.50.

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.

God in the Dust by Donna Freitas

God in the Dust:
What Catholics attacking 'The Golden Compass' are really afraid of
By Donna Freitas November 25, 2007

ON DEC. 7 New Line Cinema will release "The Golden Compass," starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, the first movie in a trilogy with the massive budget and family blockbuster potential of "The Lord of the Rings."

Yet, even before it opens, "The Golden Compass" finds itself at the center of a controversy. The Catholic League, a conservative religious organization, launched a campaign on Oct. 9 calling on all Catholics to boycott the film. The group also published a lengthy pamphlet attacking the story and distributed the pamphlet to Catholic schools across the country. Other groups have joined the fray, including the evangelical nonprofit Focus on the Family, whose magazine Plugged In urged parents to keep kids out of theaters showing the film. And the Christian blogosphere is alive with warnings not only about the movie trilogy, but also about the series of books it is based on.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, charges that the books, known as the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, are deeply anti-Christian. Donohue says he fears that the film will inspire parents to purchase "His Dark Materials" for their fantasy-hungry kids on Christmas, unaware that the third book of the series, "The Amber Spyglass," climaxes in an epic battle to destroy God. Some of the book's villains are referred to as the Magisterium - a term used to refer to the Catholic hierarchy. The British author, Philip Pullman, has said openly that he is an atheist, and Donohue charges that his books are designed to eradicate faith among children.

But this is a sad misreading of the trilogy. These books are deeply theological, and deeply Christian in their theology. The universe of "His Dark Materials" is permeated by a God in love with creation, who watches out for the meekest of all beings - the poor, the marginalized, and the lost. It is a God who yearns to be loved through our respect for the body, the earth, and through our lives in the here and now. This is a rejection of the more classical notion of a detached, transcendent God, but I am a Catholic theologian, and reading this fantasy trilogy enhanced my sense of the divine, of virtue, of the soul, of my faith in God.

The book's concept of God, in fact, is what makes Pullman's work so threatening. His trilogy is not filled with attacks on Christianity, but with attacks on authorities who claim access to one true interpretation of a religion. Pullman's work is filled with the feminist and liberation strands of Catholic theology that have sustained my own faith, and which threaten the power structure of the church. Pullman's work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox.

This emerging controversy, then, is deeply unusual. It features an artist who claims atheism, but whose work is unabashedly theistic. And it features a series of books that are at once charming and thrilling children's literature, and a story that explores some of the most divisive and fascinating issues in Catholic theology today.

Pullman wasn't always "the most dangerous man in Britain" as he has been called by columnist Peter Hitchens. Pullman studied literature at Oxford, went on to become a schoolteacher, and then discovered he had a knack for drawing middle-school-aged children to the edge of their seats over classics like "Beowulf." Pullman began to write stories of his own in the early '80s.

It wasn't until Pullman married his talent for epic adventure with the genre of children's fantasy in "His Dark Materials" that he reached a wide audience. The book the movie is based on, "The Golden Compass," came out in 1995 and won the Carnegie Medal, awarded for an outstanding book of children's literature. The sequel, "The Subtle Knife," was released in 1997, and the final installment, "The Amber Spyglass," was published in 2000 to wide acclaim, including the prestigious Whitbread Prize, the first given for a children's book. The series has sold some 12 million copies worldwide.

In interviews, Pullman has gone on record as an atheist, not only doubting God's existence but charging that organized religion has been an instrument of evil in world history. He has criticized C.S. Lewis's Christian allegory "The Chronicles of Narnia," because Pullman sees in "Narnia" a world in which innocence is so prized that Lewis never allows his heroines and heroes to grow up.

But to reduce Pullman to these few juicy sound bites is to ignore the whole of a complex, exuberantly curious intellectual who has infused his writing with a complex, crisply rendered theology.

The trilogy is a retelling of Milton's "Paradise Lost," the classic epic poem from which Pullman borrowed a line, "His Dark Materials." Milton tells of the battle between Lucifer's army of fallen angels and God's rule in heaven. In "Paradise Lost," God prevails. But in Pullman's book, the two child protagonists help to defeat the rule of the Authority and the Authority dies.

When critics say that Pullman's series advocates killing God, this is what they mean. But that is the most literal possible reading, and misses the point of the books.

The "God" who dies in "The Amber Spyglass" is not a true God at all. Pullman's Authority is an impostor, more like Milton's Lucifer than like a traditional conception of God. In the novels, the universe's first angel tricked all other angels and conscious beings created after him into believing he is God, and has spent an eternity building a corrupt empire for the purpose of hanging on to absolute power.

Readers of the trilogy know that the Authority is a tyrannical figure who uses his power to deceive, to conceal, and to terrorize. His death not only liberates all beings, but reveals the true God, in which and in whom all good things - knowledge, truth, spirit, bodies, and matter - are made. The impostor God has spent an eternity trying to wipe out all traces of the divine fabric of the true God - what Pullman calls Dust - because it is so threatening to his rule.

Most Christians are taught to imagine God through the first and second parts of the Trinity, through the Father (God) and the Son (Jesus). Pullman's vision of God is much closer to the third part of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit. Dust is the Holy Spirit.

For Christians, then, perhaps the most important concept of all in the story is that divinity isn't just a being, but a substance that loves us and animates us, yet has a mind of its own. In the books, Dust's love for humans is unconditional, even though they often do things to hurt and deplete Dust's influence and presence. Dust has many names in "His Dark Materials": Wisdom, Consciousness, Spirit, Dark Matter.

Dust also has a distinctly female cast. When Pullman personifies Dust, and he does on occasion, he uses the pronoun she. Evoking the third person of the trinity as female is nothing new - in fact it's biblical. Wisdom (Sophia in Greek) is the feminine aspect of the Holy Spirit. One finds God spoken of as she in both Proverbs and the Psalms (among other places). Framing the divine through Spirit-Sophia is nothing new either - this is a move made famous by the work of revered Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson, a professor at Fordham, in "She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse," now a classic text among Christian feminist scholars.

God is not dead, then: A false God has died and the true God - a feminine divine - is revealed.

The universe of "His Dark Materials" is far from atheistic or anti-Christian, but to understand why, we must allow ourselves to open up to a theological vision that exceeds the narrow agenda set by some Catholics.

Pullman's Dust certainly moves beyond orthodox Christian ideas about God. Dust is a "spirit" that transcends creation, but all living beings are made of Dust, so Dust is a part of creation. While Dust is indeed the divine fabric of the worlds of "His Dark Materials," Dust is not all-powerful, all-knowing, and immutable. Dust is as dependent on creation for its sustenance as we are dependent on Dust for ours.

This view of Dust echoes many of the theological ideas that the Catholic Church finds threatening today. The most obvious thread is liberation theology, the Marxist and socially progressive rereading of the Gospels born among Catholic theologians in Latin America in the 1960s. Liberation theology teaches that Jesus is a political revolutionary who loves all that God has created and wants all creation to flourish on this earth, not just in heaven. Liberation theology also holds that believers should disregard doctrine that leads to oppression.

This is not an idea in favor with the current leadership of the church. In placing the common welfare above the dictates of church authorities, this movement has sparked a long running battle with the Catholic hierarchy. The Church has issued high-profile attacks on liberation theologians, both in official Vatican documents and, perhaps most famously, in the reprimands issued to the former Brazilian Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican office led by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The cardinal is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Dust also reflects strains in feminist theology that reframe the divine as feminine and hold that Christians' relationship with the divine is mutual, not hierarchical: We make ourselves vulnerable to God as God makes God's self vulnerable to us. Many see this feminized God as a kind of heresy - a rejection literally embodied in the fact that women are forbidden to represent Jesus through the Catholic priesthood.

Pullman's characters who discover the true God fall so deeply in love with the divine that they will sacrifice everything - even the bonds of first love. They are willing to hold on to this God even if it requires that they wage war with the powers that be, the authorities called Church and Magisterium - those who rule by secrecy and serve a false God who takes the form of the old man in the sky.

It is a beautiful story, and a Christian story. It is a story that could prompt believers to reflect on their faith. It is just not a story that everyone may want you to read.

Donna Freitas is a visiting assistant professor of religion at Boston University. She is the coauthor of "Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman's Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials," and author of the forthcoming "Sex and the Soul" from Oxford University Press.

Link to Boston Globe's Article: http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/11/25/god_in_the_dust/?page=full

Donna Freitas's Web Site:
http://www.donnafreitas.com/

Saturday Morning Cereal: Marianne Moore Quotes

"Ecstasy affords / the occasion and expediency determines the form."

"The 'ability to be drunk with a sudden realization of value in things others never notice' can metamorphose our detestable reasonableness and offset a whole planetary system of deadness."

"the artist biased by imagination is the poet."

"The power of the visible / is the invisible"

"A reverence for mystery is not a vague, invertebrate thing. The realm of the spirit is the only realm in which experience is able to corroborate the fact that the real can also be the actual."

Quote of the Day

"Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him."

William James, quoted by Marianne Moore in the "Foreword" to the Marianne Moore Reader, quoted by Charles Molesworth in Marianne Moore: A Literary Life, quoted by J.K. Kelley on Write Now.