20 Things I Don't Like

Summer. Loud noise. Most hip-hop. Tequila. Peas.

Cottage cheese. Baked beans (but I like pinto beans). Pumpkin ravioli (but I love cheese or spinach ravioli). Tom Petty. Stevie Nicks.

Charles Bukowski. People who say the F-word too much. A doctor I had in 2003, uncompassionate and convinced of her own infallibility. A biology teacher I had in 1983, ditto. Talk radio.

Aggressive or reckless drivers. The New American Bible. "Dialogue" or "fellowship" used as verbs. A certain strain of overconfident, inflexibly convinced Protestantism. Brutality of any kind.

Forty miles west

The morning after Thanksgiving, at my aunt and uncle's.

A plentiful lack of elbow room

Golly, that Unitarian Harvest Moon Fair! It's a bigger mob scene than Town Day, forsooth! And all manner of awesome things are to be found at the Fair.

I gravitated toward the books and CDs, where I didn't succeed in finding any orthodox Dolanesque Catholics, but I did find a pair of social-justice Orbicular Catholics, and, as one book's title was stolen from Gerard Manley Hopkins (Send My Roots Rain by Megan McKenna), I bought it. Other books included Alan Watts's autobiography, Elizabeth Bishop's last book of poems, and an anthology edited by the light-verse-master X. J. Kennedy. Oh, and I bought Scott Brown's book for Maugham!


I went to the mammoth Blue Table, where everything is blue. I got for Maugham a pair of conical blue-tinted drinking glasses. The lady who sold them to me (Patience was her marvellous name!) suggested they'd be good for sherry. Maugham and I may put them to other uses!

Elbow room is not in ample supply at the Harvest Moon Fair. Humanity doth swarm around the tables. Some vending quilts, Christmas decorations, toasters, blenders, needlepoint hangings with Bible verses, scarves, gloves, mittens, coffee mugs, '70s board games (do any of you remember Probe? Sort of like Hangman without the gallows!), baked goods, et cetera, et cetera, ad bloody infinitum. There was even a table of computers with the punning sign CHIPS 'N' SALSA.

I met the genteel and charming lady minister! I started the conversation. She was wearing a name tag with her full name which I recognized from the church's billboard or signpost or whatchamacallit. So I said "You're the minister!" And she said yes indeedy she was. Nice lady, fiftyish. Short gray hair, and maybe glasses but I don't recollect. Slender and smiling.

As I revise the last paragraph but one, I think of what a marvellous radio broadcast Dylan Thomas would have made of the Harvest Moon Fair. He'd probably take ten paragraphs to catalogue all the cool stuff that was being sold, from plants to computers, from board-games to coffee-mugs, from scarves to framed Bible verses in needlepoint, from books to jewelry, from CDs to cupcakes. And then he'd describe the weather in terms that would make the angels sob "Selah!" And he'd describe the people, quirky, progressive, and unfailingly kind, with name-tags reading Patience and Holly and other lyrical names. And he'd probably describe the bawdy bongs of the post-modern bell-tower, chiming the hours with gusto. And he'd describe the three folksy guitarists in the cafeteria, crooning away in the bustle. He'd make a masterpiece that would rival A Child's Christmas in Wales!

Oh, and there was indeed a trio of women in casual autumn attire playing guitars and crooning folk songs in the cafeteria. (They called their little group Somebody's Mother.) The cafeteria (which opened for meals at 11.15, that is to say, after Maugham and I left) had a menu featuring all things Mexican -- and for kiddies, or for unadventurous bland American palates such as mine, hot dogs, or peanut butter sandwiches.

And did I convey what a sublime day Saturday was, weather-wise? Perfect November day, almost a mite too warm for me. Upper 40s, delicately brushing 50, and surpassing it as the day progressed, with brilliant sun that somehow seemed gentle for all its brilliance.

Oh, and the flyers and notices on the UU bulletin board! One notice advertised a lecture on the difference between Islam and Islamism. Another spoke of the rights of women in our hyper-sexualized culture. Some flyers advertised music lessons. And others, I think, English lessons.

There was a room at the UU fair called The Jewelry Box, which Maugham waited in line (perhaps sitting on her walker-seat) to get into. I didn't see this room, but Maugham was not all that favorably impressed. Which is surprising, because every other aspect of this bazaar or fair or flea market was overwhelmingly fun and good. And all those UUs, they're so friendly. Of course, I didn't (apart from buying the Scott Brown autobiography) advertise my Republicanism, which probably contributed immeasurably to the friendliness.

I almost went and talked to the ladies staffing the "Who We Are" table, providing info about Unitarianism. I would have said, "I went to a Unitarian church for three months in 1991! I've read Jack Mendelsohn's Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age!"

(I didn't just go to "a" Unitarian church. I went to the Arlington Street Church, adjacent to Boston's Public Gardens. A slight acquaintance of bygone days, the poet W--- L-------, was a member of the church. I thought, this seems to work for him, it just might work for me! It didn't. I soon discovered Thomas Merton, and the rest is history.)

But those UUs really are awesome. Kind. And that matters. Maybe I'll write a book about them called Being Kind in an Unkind Age.

The Ronald Knox Foxtrot

Some coffee and a doughnut,
Some toast and apple juice,
An egg-and-sausage sandwich,
A kick in the caboose.
At lunch, three pints of lager
And fish sticks from a box
As we rehearse the sacred verse
Englished by Ronald Knox.

Some like the modern versions
Of ageless Holy Writ,
But some are pert and slangy
And some flunk basic Lit.
King James produced a winner,
Which no one ever mocks --
But call me strange, I wouldn't change
The one by Ronald Knox.

The leaves fall in November,
And soon, the flakes of snow.
I read the book of Proverbs --
Outside it's ten below!
Let's keep the home fires burning
With Chivas on the rocks,
And turn the page to that old sage,
Monsignor Ronald Knox.

The reader at the pulpit
Proclaims the N.A.B.;
King David takes siestas?
Sounds rather odd to me.
The lectionary's awful!
Let's please turn back the clocks!
Give us a dose of sweet verbose
Monsignor Ronald Knox!

Litany of the Poor Souls

Even if your theology does not admit of Purgatory, this prayer is both lovely and necessary, I would say.  The categories of persons described in the Litany can always use our prayers!

An election post-mortem

by one Jack Hunter of The American Conservative.

Intelligently reasoned, it seems to me.  I find the writer's call for the GOP to be more like the Buckley/Reagan/Kemp party of the '80s to be palatable. Actually, throw a big helping of Ron Paul into the mix, and I'm listening.

Blue Monday

Blue Wednesday, more like.

November's antics

Don't fiddle with the gadgets in the pantry; 
Go scrape the ice from birdbaths and tree-houses. 
In the town of Marblehead, denizens are spry -- 
The water-works, the mine-shaft, what else gives? 
Woods were foliate, back when, with veined nouvelles 
At seven-three-thirty, at fourteen-five-point-six. 
Night practices her scales, the lissome singer, 
When insular starlight glozes our dismay. 
The repertoire's impertinent: loose change, 
Moon over Winnipeg, astral patty-cake. 
Is this production feeling its oats? We need perchance 
Full recompense for all those graceful oafs 
And two-bit, three-bit players -- they gave us much: 
Bright colors and a cheerful mise-en-scène. 

An echo of a celibate shibboleth, 
Eerie and wan, sneaks in beneath the harsh 
Snarl of neighbors bickering over snowbanks, 
Drifts of the white stuff blocking the Johnsons' driveway 
Through which a snazzy Merc Cyclone is wont to roll. 
The argument makes a crumpled, dusky din; 
Trees overlook the ringing ... Time out! Zut! We need 
A respite from rambunctious hoi polloi, 
Drawn-out retreats at abbeys 'mid whose groves 
Howl wolves, wail owls; every now and then 
Wafts the lyric plaint of Philomel, alias Biffo Bailey, 
On a leafless bough, alas, or winging high above 
The wounded earth, with its parties and its rhetoric, 
Breeze of a charlatan, jocular, sublime. 

Dante Alighieri

If you must write prose and poems, the words you use should be your own ...

I invite you, dear reader, to compare this (posted in 2010) to this (posted in 2002).

The might of one fair face

Cavatina

by David Gascoyne (1916-2001)


Now we must bear the final real
Convulsion of the breast, for the sublime 
Relief of the catharsis; and the cruel
Clear grief; the dear redemption from the crime, 
The sublimation of the evil dream.

Beneath, all is confused, dense and impure; 
Extraordinary shiftings of a nameless mass 
From plane to plane, then some obscure 
Catastrophe:
The shattered Cross
High on its storm-lit hill, the searchlight eyes 
Whose lines divide the black dome of the skies,
Are implicated; and the Universe of Death --
Gold, excrement and flesh, the spirit’s malady, 
A secret animal’s hot breath ...

Yet through disaster a faint melody
Insists; and the interior suffering like a silver wire 
Enduring and resplendent, strongly plied 
By genius’ hands into the searching fire 
At last emerges and is purified.

Its force like violins in pure lament 
Persists, sending ascending stairs 
Across the far wastes of the firmament
To carry starwards all our weight of tears.