If you ain't singin it's your own damn fault

I needed this video this morning

W.B. Yeats

I felt like crying for no reason all day today, so I’m reading some W.B. Yeats and drinking a beer before blessed sleep.  Here’s some of my favs of his lesser-known poetry.

Ephemera

‘Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.’

And then she:
‘Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!’

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
‘Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.’

The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.

‘Ah, do not mourn,’ he said,
‘That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.’

The Two Trees

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Joves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile.
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For ill things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and sigh.

The Coming of Wisdow with Time

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

And, to round things out, the poem that W.H. Auden wrote when Yeats died (which often comes to mind when I wake up on dark cold days):

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

by W. H. Auden

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of tomorrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

More fun with CSA

My phone takes crappy pictures so I’ll spare you the twitpic, but this is delicious.  I actually didn’t change a thing*, and usually when a recipe is this simple I’ll do my own spice magic.

Succotash of Fresh Corn, Lima Beans, Tomatoes and Onions
from Bon Appetit Magazine

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
Coarse kosher salt
1 large garlic clove, minced
3 cups chopped red tomatoes (about 1 1/2 pounds)
2 1/4 cups corn kernels cut from 4 ears of corn (preferably 2 ears of white corn and 2 ears of yellow corn)
2 cups fresh lima beans (from about 2 pounds pods) or 10 to 11 ounces frozen lima beans or baby butter beans, thawed
3 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh basil

Preparation:
Heat oil in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add onion and sprinkle with coarse salt. Sauté until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add garlic; stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add tomatoes, corn, and lima beans. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until corn and lima beans are tender and tomatoes are soft, about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Stir in basil and serve.

*OK I did use more garlic than the recipe calls for because, seriously, who uses only one clove of garlic?

Since you guys liked the last Thao Nguyen song so much

My obsession this week

NYC Sky

I can’t believe I only got one comment after posting these pictures last night via twitpic and facebook mobile upload.

Fun with CSA

Kasey and I signed up to split a full share from the Greensgrow CSA this season, and I’ve spent the past few evenings playing with the food from week 3.

Tonight I decided to go out on a limb and make pizza using dough from this recipe.  So, yeah, tonight I made pizza with beets in the dough.  I didn’t use either of the “Cooking Photographer”s pizza toppings but just opted to go with a simple olive oil and cheese topping (adam does pizzas that way and I don’t know why but it’s good).  At the last minute I decided as an experiment to throw some kale on top, since I got a few bunches of that from the CSA as well.

It came out pretty good, although I’m not sure I would do it again.  Mostly because I’m not very into the whole homemade pizza thing.

I twitpic-ed the process here and here and here.  It was Adam’s idea to do it in the square baking sheet.  I knew I had enough dough for two pizzas but I only had one round pizza pan.  Even in the square one it came out much too thick, but I actually kind of enjoyed it thick.

While the pizza dough was doing its dough thing, I took the leaves from the beets and followed this recipe to make some delicious sautéed beet leaves with caramelized onions.

Funny story about beet leaves.  So week 1 of the CSA I was in a hurry and missed a couple things when I picked up my food.  I was supposed to get red swish chard as well as beets in week 1, and I had missed one of those but since I had never before purchased either item I didn’t know which one I had missed.  I googled swiss chard to see what it looked like and it looked just like the pictures so I went ahead and loosely followed this recipe to fix it.

Well when I got week 3 of the CSA on saturday there were beets promised but no chard and when I took a look at the beets I realized that in week 1 I had picked up the beets not the chard.  So I had cooked beet leaves thinking they were chard leaves.  So I thought I was pretty silly until I googled beet leaves and found out that people cook very similarly with them too, and that chard is closely related.

Incidentally, I also made this from the items from week 1, which was very, very delicious.

Incidentally, from week 3 I got some seitan so on sunday I just barbequed it up and threw it in a salad, which came out pretty delicious too.

Long story short I’ve been doing all kinds of wacky things already, and this is only the second week I’ve gotten food from the CSA.  I’ve always liked to try cooking different things but never liked long involved recipes.  So far I’ve been able to stick to that for the most part (beet dough pizza tonight was an exception) and sometimes just made up my own things, which has actually been really fun.

And I’ve been eating salad like a salad monster.

The Thing About Twitter

So, as you probably know, I’m a pretty avid twitterer or tweeter or whatever (I guess I’m not that avid cause if I was I’d know what you’re supposed to call it). But I’m having issues with the public/private profile thing.

When I first got started on twitter, my profile was public.  I wasn’t on there for too long before I tweeted about being at a Camden Riversharks game, and the next day some creepy middle-aged dude who was obsessed with the Phillies started following me (yes I know that describes like half of Philadelphia but bear with me).  That weirded me out.  I didn’t like having some random creepy middle-aged dude following me, and I didn’t like the idea that a random creepy stranger would be keyword searching on twitter and find me and start following me.

I know that’s supposed to be part of the beauty of twitter and why it’s so popular, but it still bothers me.  Maybe if I had tweeted about something that I cared more about and someone else who cared about it too had found me through that, I wouldn’t find it so creepy.  But that still hasn’t really happened for me.

So after I realized the creepy Phillies fan was following me (and I blocked him) I started thinking about it and got freaked out by the idea that anyone could follow me or see my updates, especially since I would often tweet my location.  So I decided to make my profile private.

As time went by with my profile private, I started using twitter for more than just checking out what my friends had to say.  I started following news and tweet trends, and some people that I don’t even know IRL.  And I started to regret having my profile set to private.  I followed a twitter conference and tried to chime in but no one could see what I sent.  I felt left out that my tweets weren’t contributing to tweet trends and twitscoop and all that.  Etc.

So a couple months ago or so I went public again with my profile.  At first I got a lot of spammy followers.  Sometimes if I didn’t get around to blocking them right away, their account was already deleted by the time I did get around to it.  Real spammers.  But then I started getting followers who were real people and seem nice enough but I have no interest in following them and I don’t understand what possible interest they have in following me.  And I’m still kind of uncomfortable with the idea of these people that I have nothing in common with following me.  So I consider blocking them.  But I feel like blocking is such a negative action… I don’t want them to completely seal them off from my twitter account, I just don’t want them to follow me.  And twitter makes it clear that if a lot of people block your profile, they’ll deactivate your account.  I don’t want to help deactive a well meaning but hapless person’s account.  But there’s no option with a public profile to reject a follow request other than to block the follower.

So now I’m got a philly baker, a hollywood heavy metal band, and a restaurant in New Jersey (among others) following me on twitter and I just feel downright uneasy about it.  Not so uneasy that I am ready to block them or go back to having a private profile, but still uneasy.

Does anyone else have this problem and what do you do about it?  Do you just get over it after a while?