Artichokes, celeriac, leeks,
onions -- a simple shopping list except there is not a
single leek to be had in the produce aisles. For some
reason, I wander the supermarket aisles musing on whether
or not poetry matters instead of on which other market I
might try for leeks. Normally I would say to myself,
"Self, of course poetry matters!" and get on with
shopping for produce. But this is really bugging me. Does
poetry matter?
As I carry the artichokes,
celeriac, and onions across the parking lot to the car, I
find myself thinking about Tu Fu's Ballad
of the Army Carts. I
saw something on CNN about bringing back the draft. That
could explain why I'm thinking about Ballad of the
Army Carts (it's about conscripts going off to war --
in Tang dynasty times). Clearly poetry matters to me
if my reaction to the disquieting memory of high
school days when 18-year-olds couldn't vote and the boys
were being drafted to fight in VietNam is to recite that
poem to myself. Still, nobody wanders the produce
department wondering whether artichokes
matter.
It goes without saying that
artichokes, celeriac, leeks, and onions matter. But you
can't eat poetry. The debate about whether poetry matters
goes back at least to the ancient Greeks -- would Plato
have poets in the Republic? Were there societies where
poetry mattered? In primitive cultures when people sat
around the fire exchanging stories with rhythm and rhyme,
did they think of it as poetry? Was it so central to
their social cohesion that it never ocurred to them to
ask the question? Is asking whether poetry matters
somehow an issue of western civilization?
Nancy gave me a collection of haiku
by Japanese women for my birthday. The poems are well
chosen and cover a period from the 17th century heyday of
haiku to the 20th century modern era. That got me
thinking about the culture of haiku poets in 17the
century Japan (Basho and friends) and wondering whether
they were central to society or on the margins. Same for
the Tang dynasty poets. They wrote to and about each
other and about rivers and mountains and fleeing the
bureaucracy, but did the bureaucracy care? Why exactly
did disgraced or burned out bureaucrats end up in the
countryside singing the praises of rivers and mountains?
These are not things I should be
thinking about instead of where to get some leeks for
supper or whether I should make something else that
doesn't require leeks. This is just an extension of the
weird reverie I went into on Thursday when I went
to
Avenue Victor Hugo after an
afternoon meeting with my temporary employers in
Cambridge. Just a quick trip across the river to check in
on how AVH is doing in selling off its inventory at 50%
off in preparation for closing after 29 years. Charla had
emailed me that she wanted something from AVH to remember
it by, as she has a chair from Gregor's
in Seattle. A chair might
be a bit much and they're not selling off the fixtures
'til May, so I asked the cashier about the don't stick
your tongue out at the cat signs. They're not going to
sell the original and she wasn't sure how many/if any
copies there are. She told me to come back in May.
Meanwhile, I picked up Eastward the Sea by Charles
Haywood, which I had browsed at on my last trip in
February -- hey, it's a major expedition to go to Newbury
Street from the edge of the universe these days and
besides that the only remaining reasons to go there are
Trident and AVH -- as well as Life with the Ladies of
Llangollen, selected for obvious reasons, and The
Wild Edge by Philip Kopper, selected because it goes
on for pages and pages about Ammophila brevigulata
and has an index entry for Pilkey, Orrin. Since
Nancy and I plan to go there again this weekend, weather
and Furball permitting, I passed up the John Marquand
novels in the New England fiction section so I could
check my shelves for which ones I don't have. I mean I
searched so long for Wickford Point that my brain
could easily convince me that I don't have it since the
memory of looking for it takes up more storage than the
memory of
Phil-person-of-Domino finding it for me
and I wouldn't want to end
up with two copies of Wickford Point when there
are other readers out there waiting for the great John
Marquand revival. My goodness what a long paragraph this
is! All of this leads up to either the spectacular beauty
of the magnolias in bloom among the brownstones on
Commonwealth Ave or the impending demise of books as a
medium for the continuity of civilization, despite the
fact that the book is still the "killer app" for
reading.
The gloom and doom over books,
besides being a theme this journal has dealt with off and
on since I read Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg
Elegies back in 1995 and disagreed with it (still do)
is triggered by a jeremiad on the AVH
website in which someone
named John Usher blames everybody and everything except
the Curse of the Bambino and Harry Frazee for AVH's
closing after 29 years. So after I duly emailed Charla
that artifacts from AVH would not be available 'til May,
I settled in with my civilzation-destroying broadband
Internet connection and set out to find out who this
Usher guy is (he's not the proprietor of AVH). A search
on "John Usher" "The Hound" (that's the name of the piece
the jeremiad is from) and discovered that I have been
missing a lot since I gave up reading online journals
(and blogs) because of my war anxiety. Apparently the
closing of AVH and the Usher diatribe have provided
fodder for journallers and bloggers and pundits all
across America since the closing was announced in March.
And here I thought this was a local issue caused by the
outrageous rents and general extreme gentrification of
Newbury Street. Apparently it's a national issue and
civilzation itself is in peril.
Librarians
don't like being
blamed. Editors
who also blog are sad. The
comments on this
blogger's entry raise the
obvious point that whoever this Usher guy is, he is
clearly not from Boston as he fails to blame either the
Big Dig or Grady Little. It made the April
News and Cruel
Site of the Day and over at
Lorem
Ipsum, as one door closes
another one opens. And speaking of the Curse of the
Bambino and the Big Dig, the Red Sox and Yankees are tied
at 2 apiece as I write this and I've got to leave to pick
up Nancy at South Station before we head back up off the
edge of the universe to bid, bid, bid at the Furball
auction tonight. With the current Big Dig diversion it's
beastly hard to turn left on Lincoln Street off of
Surface Road to get to the bus station's parking lot so I
had better allow extra time and get my ass away from the
civilzation-destroying Internet and into the belly of the
civilzation-destroying Big Dig.
To be continued...
