Archives for January 22, 2008

Since arriving in Connecticut on Saturday evening, I’ve written nearly seven thousand words of the ninth chapter of my Louis Armstrong biography (which for the moment is now tentatively retitled Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong). It feels as though I’d rammed a spade into the ground and struck oil on the first try.

For the moment I can’t think about anything else–all I want to do is sit at the computer and write–and Mrs. T is being unbelievably patient with me. We went to the grocery store this afternoon to stock up for the coming week, and I actually got lost at one point. Instead of paying attention to what we were doing, I started thinking about Armstrong’s Hollywood career, pushed the cart down the wrong aisle, and vanished from sight for a good five minutes.

I expect to return to the real world a little later this week, but for the moment it’s 1938 in my head.

Please bear with me….

I very much like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and revisit the poem (story? fairy tale?) every so often. Re-reading it this past time, I was struck by how much Laura’s sin, of eating the goblin fruit, has its mirror in the new food asceticism, which also at times equates eating the wrong things with immorality. (I’m thinking of the Skinny Bitches and their ilk, though one imagines the only objection the Skinny Bitches would have to goblin fruit is if it wasn’t organic.)
If this idea is phrased inelegantly, just be grateful I didn’t approach you with any of the “Discussion Questions” that run alongside the poem. It’s hard to imagine the discussion that wouldn’t be stopped dead in its tracks by “feminist poem or religious allegory?”
Recently, Guardian blogger Shirley Dent took up a similar line of thought, finding parallels between the advice of modern diet books and 13th-century religious guides for women that warn, “Lechery comes from gluttony and from enjoyment of the flesh, for as St Gregory says, ‘Food and drink beyond what is right give birth to three broods: frivolous words, frivolous deeds, and lechery’s desire'”.

We are suffering an incursion of mice in the kitchen. This is the sort of thing the cat used to take care of, but she appears to have retired. In the evenings she’s taken to sitting in the doorway and watching as mice dance back and forth across the floor, swishing her tail and forth like she’s at a particularly enjoyable performance of The Nutcracker.
So a few nights ago we put out traps. Two different kinds; eight in all: Enough to booby-trap the main drawers and cabinets. Mr. Tingle just checked them and made this report:
1. No mice caught.
2. Peanut-butter bait has been eaten from all traps.
3. Three of the traps have been crapped on.
About the last he says, “Now I know what it’s like to be bitch slapped by a mouse.”

“Blue as you enter it disappears. Red never does that. Every article of air might look like cobalt if we got outside ourselves to see it. The country of the blue is clear.”
William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry