Poem a Week
by Gary Michael Dault

 

Spaceships in my Lap
 
sci-fi
gave me a youth
it lent me
overheated truth
 
it put
spaceships
in my lap
I could trace them
on my cereal-box
map
savage worlds colliding
over my bed
 
The Man
from Planet X
looked like
a sandcastle
(of course he
was in poor
English-moor
black and white
and couldn't therefore
breathe)
he wasn't quite alive
or convincingly
dead
he stumped through
the midlands
like Winnie-the-Pooh
 
scientists
kinder than
my father
(more like
my grandfather)
with bow ties
and vests
shot spaceships
taut as darts
down mountains
and back up again
into black
counterpane
skies on the other side
(escaping earth
was all
for our own good)
 
after liftoff
you could breathe
on a silver
spaceship
smiling bravely
at a space attendant
who smiled back
a mother smile
and handed you
a bowl of rice krispies
with milk and sugar

 

 

a new photograph every day
by Lee Ka-sing

 

OCEAN POUNDS

 

Aotearoa
by Madeleine Slavick 思樂維

Vineyard veil

View archive

 

 

ProTesT
by Cem Turgay

 

 

From the Notebooks (2010-2021)
by Gary Michael Dault

 

From the Notebooks, 2010-2021.
Number 121: From The Tulip Book (a notebook in progress);
Red Tulip with Orange Shadow (January 1, 2022).

 

ART LOGBOOK
by Holly Lee

 

1

INSTITUTE - Emily Garthwaite - The Last of the Marsh Arabs
https://www.thestoryinstitute.com/sweetwater

2

From a Shopify catalog see Toronto-born multidisciplinary artist Sean Brown's handmade CD-shaped rugs

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0026/4683/5273/files/Curves-Catalog-2021-Feb-Web.pdf?v=1614296114

3

Before Stanley Kubrick became the acclaimed and iconic director that he is now remembered, he spent five prolific years as a photographer for Look magazine, specialising in depicting the highs and lows of New York City.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/stanley-kubrick-photographs-new-york-street-life/?amp=

(From George Chang)

 

4

HUMAN's Musics - A film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand / Composed by Armand Amar (1:23:35)
A great movie to watch, no plot, no boundaries, no conflicts, no politics, no war, no hate, only love, music, visuals.
https://youtu.be/uog4eCZTUX4

 

 

ART LOGBOOK is a new column with contributions by various authors.

 

Bonsoir

 

Taking Notes
by Jeff Jackson

 

“ High Heel and Perfume Bottle “, Christian Dior Exhibition, McCord Museum, Montreal, 2021.

 

 

The Photograph
coordinated by Kamelia Pezeshki

Window, Queen W, Toronto, 2018, by Jude Marion

View archive

 

Caffeine Reveries
by Shelley Savor

 

Winter Dusk Drive

View archive

 

 

Travelling Palm Snapshots
by Tamara Chatterjee

 

India (May, 2017) – Despite the temperatures we headed back to Baboo Ghat for another tour of people watching. I meandered around, in between the makeshift altars and priests offering sanctification for those in need of blessings. It was serious devotional business; taking places just steps away from the Ganges, seemingly so removed from the monstrous cityscape beyond.

View archive

Leaving Taichung Station
by Bob Black

 

Golden Dragonfly and the Step

“they travelled a long”—Maria Stepanova

Color arrives when my eyes turn inward from winter’s wake, the sky turning its white hue’d whale skin, inside out
When in the morning comes the sputtering of tongues flapping,
as I settle between your legs, honey'd from sleep and finger dream,
each of our breasts small coins of copper dusted by the myrrh
that comes swept up from the corner by the occuli of night
all of which allows to settle our over-long bones upon the reedy pond of this life,
take what it may and recumbent:
shorn of weight, stiff of loss spurting toward larvae we could not have imagined
rutted in the muck of this beauty, both black and talcum and amber tickt.

The theatre of lines, a pavilion of shadows

The afternoon spirals upward, your pelvis pushing against hope
that soft undercurrent diagraming beneath a surface which hovers:
from some long-sorrowful echo when comes a landscape of nourishment,
groins and breast and beacon all lit up
the beads of skeleton'd sounds like rusted cans scattering, aplum.

So we too, gathered, are at run, coke bottles for legs
Orion's buckle cackling.
Will it as the earth breaks its spiral spun thin as flax,
the weight of your heart in her palm,
in need of some quiet against all the raging inside and out...

To shift through hickory and honey-comb'd light...
To unseat a wobbly head and regain the recumbent, flickering heart

If I were to live but a day,
this is the world over which I would copter.
So much to pick through from the shoreline and the noticing,
even if the wings grown soft from the pushing,
even if the breath grows hard from the tugging.

An approach of light, as if an eye unlocking

Gravity aroused and turned upside down; pulled up-weight by its magnificent, rusting bootstraps,
soaring, tumbling and still through cornered air, around blocks of cement, inside white-walled halls.

We carve light from shadow; husk cob of time from skin of shadow,
draw circles out of incurable lines.

View archive

 

 

The Raw and the Cooked, MYTHOLOGIQUES
(A column on the culture of eating and cooking)

Venus in the Kitchen or Love's Cookery Book by Norman Douglas
by Gary Michael Dault

 

   In his very amusing introduction to this famous (infamous), highly specialized culinary self-help book that purports to be a handbook to the preparing of libidinous foods in support of the flagging libido, Stephen Fry observes that Venus in the Kitchen  (originally published in 1952)  "has all the proud, name-dropping ornament, ostentation, and, one might say, showoffiness, of much of Douglas's work, but it is directed humorously and purposefully.  Any cookbook which can begin a recipe with the instruction, 'Clean and truss a young crane' clearly has a great deal going for it.  How, too, can one dislike a book that includes such commands as '...take several brains of male sparrows and half that quantity of the brains of pigeons which have not yet begun to fly'?"
     One can't, I dare say.  Dislike it, I mean.  One might find oneself occasionally restive, I suppose, at the book's unending outlandishness, at its jaunty grotesquerie, its carefully wicked outrageousness.  But, as a longtime admirer of Norman Douglas's writings at large (his dates are 1868-1952) , I can assure the wary reader that outre quality of Venus in the Kitchen, its endless verbal and procedural extravagance, is simply what Douglas is like as a writer.

 

     I own a handsome, two-volume, 1929 edition of Douglas's best known novel. South Wind (first published in 1917).  I've been trying to read it for years, never before getting much past page 50.  It was only in the last few weeks that, once again determinedly assaying its sustained sparkling wit and the author's often caustic pillorying of his own free-floating characters, I am now nearing the end of Volume 1 and am loving every overheated page of it.  Douglas is a dandy among dandies, a consummate writer of what is sometimes called mandarin prose."  He's not an easy read.  But he offers the reader untold riches in what is now a pretty bleak and joyless age.  As novelist H. M. Tomlinson (another writer I enjoy who is, alas, little read anymore) wrote in an exquisite little book about Douglas in 1931,  "With Norman Douglas, erudition is as airy as the bright balls a conjuror weaves fascinatingly aloft."
     My journey back through all the Norman Douglas I could find, led me, of course, to Venus in the Kitchen.
     The recipes in the book are clearly not all wildly Priapian.  Some of them, like Almond Soup, are downright cozy:

      "Blanch a quart of almonds and pound them in the mortar with the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs till they come to a fine paste.
      Mix them by degrees with a quart of chicken stock, and a quart of cream.  Stir well together, and when well-mixed, put in a saucepan
      over a gentle fire, and keep stirring all the time,  Take care it does not curdle.  Serve when hot."

Sounds innocent enough.  Norman's Baked Truffles is perhaps a little more arcane (Douglas loved truffles passionately):

     "Choose some good white truffles, wash with care, wrap each of them in five or six pieces of paper previously soaked in water.
     Cook in hot cinders, remove the sheets of paper, dry the truffles, and serve them hot among the folds of a well warmed table napkin.
     Familiar, and yet too little eaten."

Familiar to Norman Douglas maybe.
     One of my favourite, essentially dada recipes in Venus in the Kitchen is Douglas's outlandish, well-nigh impossible Roti sans Pareil.  It's more a work of conceptual art than the route to fine dining:

     "Take a large olive, stone it and stuff it with a paste made of anchovy, caper and oil [I'd stop here, if I were you]
     Put the olive inside a trussed and boned bec-figue (garden warbler).
     Put the bec-figue inside a fat ortolan.
     Put the ortolan inside a boned lark.
     Put the stuffed lark inside a boned thrush.
     Put the thrush inside a fat quail.
     Put the quail, wrapped in vine-leaves, inside a boned lapwing.....

     This carefree, wanton stuffing of bird into bird then continues for ten more hapless creatures (involving a guinea-fowl, a duck, a pheasant, a "fat wild goose," a turkey and a "boned bustard").  You end by fitting the whole arrangement into a big saucepan with onions, carrots, small squares of ham, celery, mignonette, several strips of bacon and two cloves of garlic, and then roasting it over a gentle fire for ten hours.  As a PS to the recipe, Douglas notes ruefully that "it might be difficult to find Bustards in Europe nowadays."  He also expresses sorrow that "the common partridge, one of the best of all game birds, is not represented in this aviary."   A pity, certainly.
     After such licentiousness, what forgiveness?
     Well, a couple of pages after his roast aviary, Douglas, apparently contrite, suddenly turns sweet and comforting. Here is his Anchovy Toast:

     Cut some slices of bread, toast nicely, trim to any shape required.  Have ready a hot-water plate, on which pit four ounces of butter; let       it melt; add the yolks of four raw eggs, one tablespoon of anchovy sauce, Nepaul pepper to taste.  Mix all well together, and dip the             toast in, both sides; let it well soak into the mixture.  Serve very hot, piled on a dish, and garnished with parsley.  Anchovies have                 long been famed for their lust-provoking virtues.

Venus in the Kitchen also offers drinks.  Here is Douglas's  Hippogras Aphrodisiac:

     Here is a recipe for this unrivalled stimulant:
                    Crushed cinnamon  30 grammes
                    Ginger 30 grammes
                    Cloves 8 grammes
                    Vanilla 8 grammes
                    White sugar 2 pounds
                    Red Bourgogne wine  1 quart

And, finally, his Hysterical Water:

     Take seeds of wild parsnip. betony, and roots of lovage, of each two ounces; roots of single peony four ounces;
     of mistletoe of the oak three ounces; myrrh a quarter of an ounce, and castor half an ounce.  Beat all of these together, and add
     to them a quarter of a pound of dried millepedes.  Pour on these three quarts of mugwort water, and two quarts of brandy.  Let them             stand in a closed vessel eight days, and then still it in a cold still pasted up.  You may draw off nine pints of water, and sweeten it
     to your taste.  Mix all together and bottle it up.

Was this a joke?  Knowing Norman Douglas's writing as I do, I doubt it.

 

 

The Raw and the Cooked, MYTHOLOGIQUES is a new column on the culture of eating and cooking, with contributions by various authors. The column name is borrowed from the title of a book by Claude Levi-Strauss. It is spontaneous, a little amusing but serious at the same time.

 

New Release
The Fountain, the Shop, the Rhythmic Train
(Double Double, edition January 2022)

 

 

 

MONDAY ARTPOST
ISSN 1918-6991
Published on Mondays, with columns by Artists and Writers
Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication

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