This post is about two things: food and music. If I thought I was clever, I might say food for the body and food for the soul (instead I'll just make an oblique reference to the possibility that I think I'm clever). Or maybe it's just about three things I like.

The first: soup. I think I've perfected a warm, vegetable-full soup to rival chicken noodle in comfort. I call it beans & barley, partly because that's precisely what's in it and partly in homage to one of my favorite places in Milwaukee. So here's the recipe--or maybe just the formula (all amounts are approximate--use ingredients in whatever ratio you like):
Soak dry beans (3/4 cup) overnight (I use some heirloom cranberry beans I got at the farmers' market in Madison, which is not to imply any sort of foodie snobbiness. But they are really delicious.).
Chop onions (2), garlic (3 cloves), and ginger-root (1 tablespoon) and saute in butter or olive oil until the onions are translucent. Add chopped carrots (3/4 pound) and celery (about as much in volume as there is carrot), the beans, and some pearl barley (1/2 cup) and chopped cilantro (1 tablespoon), and six or seven cups of water. Salt generously. Bring to a boil, and then let simmer until the beans are cooked through and the barley is tender, about an hour. Add some more chopped cilantro, the juice of one lemon, and some freshly ground pepper, and you're home free. It's nice with bread (I recommend any recipe from the King Arthur Flour website).

Second thing: The not-supergroup Monsters of Folk, specifically, and ushering, in the abstract. Last night I ushered for the Monsters of Folk concert in Chicago, which means I got to see a great show (with pretty prime seats) totally free, in exchange for arriving an hour early, dressing in black and white, and showing people to their seats. On Monsters of Folk: their C.D. is pretty swell, but the show was really fun because they played songs from all the members' oeuvres--a highlight was Bright Eyes' "The Bottom of Everything" with each member of Monsters of Folk taking a verse. Also, the lights were really, really good.

Third thing: The Life of the World To Come, the new album from The Mountain Goats. The songs are based on individual Bible verses, but they are neither religious nor not religious. What they are is real nice listening. My favorite is probably Deuteronomy 2:10, which is obscurely titled and about extinct animals.

p.s. Happy Halloween.

Sketch in October

The towboat is freckled with rust. What's it doing here so far inland?
It is a heavy extinguished lamp in the cold.
But the trees have wild colors: signals to the other shore.
As if people wanted to be fetched.

On my way home I see mushrooms sprouting
------------------------------------up through the lawn.
They are the fingers, stretching for help, of someone
who has long sobbed to himself in the darkness down there.
We are the earth's.

-Tomas Transtromer, 1987

Last week was a self-imposed week off, I guess.

Perseverance

I shall look at the grass
Till I obtain the degree
Of Doctor of Grass.

I shall look at the clouds
Till I become a Master
Of Clouds.

I shall walk beside the smoke
Till out of shame
The smoke returns to the flame
Of its beginning.

I shall walk beside all things
Till all things
Come to know me.

-Marin Sorescu

Like They Say

Underneath the tree on some
soft grass I sat, I

watched two happy
woodpeckers be dis-

turbed by my presence. And
why not, I thought to

myself, why
not.

-Robert Creeley

The Answer

Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
------and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
------the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
------and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
------not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
------the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
------and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
------the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
------of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
------or drown in despair when his days darken.

-Robinson Jeffers, 1935

"Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for eight hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone facades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and man remain to populate a dead world. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by over-population in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets.

"What was once the abnormal has become the usual, standard condition of things. Even so, the human being is ill at east in this strange new environment, and the tension demanded of him weighs heavily on his life and being."

-"The Technological Society", Jacques Ellul

So what are people for? Is there any way to live without being in this "strange new environment", without having your life and being weighed upon? Or, to quote Lewis Hyde: should I go back to the university, or what?