Poetry alert—hit Back to cancel
Paul is chug-a-lugging Yeats these days, and yesterday sent me He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. This isn’t one of my bike-yelling poems, but it’s a favorite nonetheless. In return, I sent him Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats:

‘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…’

It turns out that yesterday was the anniversary of Yeats’ death in 1939. Fitting, I suppose, that two Brooklyn bloggers would exchange his lines as small gifts between technical projects. This is the modest immortality that Patrick Kavanagh hopes for in Wet Evening in April:

‘The birds sang in the wet trees
And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy. ‘

‘Do I contradict myself?
Very well, I contradict myself
(I am large; I contain multitudes)’
It is difficult for a European to accept American individualism as an unambiguous Good Thing. ‘But it’s selfish!’ we cry. ‘And lonely! And what about universal healthcare?’

However, today I feel in the mood for some Whitman, whose barbaric yawp silences my inner Eurotrash so that, like Molly Bloom, I assent joyfully. This is a good poem for the start of a century.

‘I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes;
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.’

The Economist is worth the subscription for the ads alone.

YEMEN
Tugging the future by the forelock!

or:
SLOVENIA
[Insert pic of blonde in tight business suit]
We’ve got some really nice figures!

Please hold. Your call is important to us.
My mother recently decided that she had a telepathic connection to my sister, Claire. Unfortunately, she failed to make this known in advance. Claire started to get plaintive, sometimes downright annoyed, voicemail messages.
‘I was standing in your bedroom willing you to call, and you didn’t. Where are you?’
She doesn’t try it with me, probably because my horror of the telephone would waste her time. But I don’t know whether to wear a protective saucepan or a satellite dish on my head, just in case.

Miyuki is Vindigo’s receptionist, and also bass guitarist/lead singer for The Rogers Sisters. Half Hawaiian, half Japanese, he grew up in Maui, Liberia and Geneva. Oozes charisma.

Tricia, his girlfriend, told me Miyuki was walking down a Brooklyn street a few weeks ago when he fell into step with another man. The guy was singing Anna, a fairly obscure Beatles song. Miyuki joined in with a harmony. His new friend was delighted. They sang louder, looking straight ahead, still walking. At the corner, they shook hands and parted.

It is just plain wrong to live in a town where you have to drive everywhere.

Words I like
#1: Merkin. It means pubic wig. Why would you need a pubic wig, in these days of the (wince) Brazilian? We should give it a new definition and bring it back into circulation. Maybe as a replacement for ‘Euro’.

Chinatown
I’ve biked through Chinatown almost every morning and evening for the last nine months. I’ve lived in New York for four years. I don’t know why it took me this long to park the bike, wrestle with the removeable saddle, clip the helmet to my bag, and wander around there. At Diamond Supermarket, the sea-cucumbers are dried or live. Two rows away from the Kotex you can browse a huge range of mysterious powdered things. Kelp. Red bean. Nori. Shrimp. Mung bean. The delicate white and jade porcelain that I’d admired in a chi-chi Cobble Hill store is on sale for $12.95 a plate. The live eels are sluggish and overcrowded as kosher wieners.

In Pearl Chinese Department Store (gearing up to celebrate Year of the Dragon), more pretty porcelain. Embroidered slippers are ten bucks. Silk cheong-sams, $75—is that the same one that Tea Leoni is wearing in this month’s Vogue (sniffily captioned ‘A Chinatown find’)? God forbid the advertisers find out.

I’m dizzy with new stuff. I take my new laundry bag and wall-hooks to Pho Bang to celebrate with a bowl of Vietnamese noodles. The waiter is fatherly, and won’t let me order tripe. We compromise on beef tendon—shin? I flex my own shin idly while I’m waiting. Too toned to taste good.

A plate of beansprouts and holy basil arrives, with a fork for the white girl. I take a few polite bites of this bland salad. Next to me, a two year-old in a garish Hello Kitty padded silk jacket laughs from her booster seat, then smacks her fist to her mouth and blows me a huge wet kiss; a new trick. She’s probably amused that I’m eating my garnish before the pho arrives. The lone woman sitting on the other side takes pity.
‘You put that in your soup,’ she explains. I feel daft. I knew that.

Pho, fabulous pho. It is such fun to slurp and watch the comings and goings. I think of Anthony Bourdain, who fell in love with Vietnam in A Cook’s Tour. I smell wet dog, realize that the parents of the little girl were allowed to order tripe, and decide to leave an extra dollar for my waiter-protector. A fifty per cent tip on my four dollar lunch, which I follow with tapioca tea. Black beads suspended in ice-cubes and jasmine tea, like chewy frogspawn. I’m still wide-eyed at the produce stores.

When I moved to London at 18, I was lucky enough to fall in with a gay 38-year old roommate who took me to a different ethnic restaurant every night. My bland Irish palate revolted at this spicy, mysterious food, but I was too awestruck to say. I got to like most of it: Gujarati, Malaysian, Persian, Thai, Vietnamese. (Most Irish girls are not so lucky. My vegetarian sister finally overcame her egg gag-reflex yesterday and ate a mushroom and onion omelette. Her friend Jilly, visiting from Dublin, made a face. ‘I don’t eat vegetables.’)

At 22, back in London with no Keith to show me around, I grew timid about restaurants again. Eating out was a treat, and I was too shy and cheap to experiment. London discourages it as much as New York demands it. I fell into the habit of going to the same branch of an Italian chain and ordering the same thing each time (roasted vegetables, then seafood cavatelli). I knew what it would taste like and what it would cost, and I knew how to use the utensils and order the wine. This seemed important.

I’m sorry now that I was so afraid of making mistakes, and I wish I could thank the people who made me try new things anyway. I raise my tapioca tea to them all. (It’s good.)

The importance of being Lola
A Lola is a muse, a powerful creature, much immortalized, the name rolled around on the tongue of the enslaved artist. The kiss in the name is even clearer in Spanish, where the letter ‘l’ trips off the top teeth rather than the alveolar ridge of decorous English.

Lo-li-ta. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Lo-la. L-O-L-A, Lo-la
Maria de los Dolores Porrys y Montez: Lola Montez

None of these Lolas was christened with the name. The sorrowful, dumpy ‘Dolores’ has nothing to do with Lola. Lolahood is attained; a reward or a punishment for brazenness, exoticism, and more.

I won’t call my daughter Lola.

Tehee!
Mark (this week’s guest star) was telling me about the wild English branch of his family. They lived in a row house in Dudley, a few doors down from a High Anglican church. On Sunday mornings, the Smiths liked to stick their arses out the window and moon the High Anglicans. It was a weekly event, like the hymns.

This image prompted me to trawl for Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. Alisoun is an inspired heroine. She loves Nicholas, but lovelorn Absolon stalks her. He sighs and moans under their window all night. Eventually, she promises him a kiss if only he will go away.

‘Thanne make thee redy, quod she, I come anon.
And unto nicholas she seyde stille,
Now hust, and thou shalt laughen al thy fille.’

I picture her rolling her eyes at Nicholas as, outside, Absolon gets down on his knees, closes his eyes and puckers up. She throws the window open and tells him to get on with it.

Have do, quod she, com of, and speed the faste,
Lest that oure neighebores thee espie.
This absolon gan wype his mouth ful drie.
Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole,
And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,
And absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers,
But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers
Ful savourly, er he were war of this.
Abak he stirte, and thoughte it was amys,
For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd.
He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd,
And seyde, fy! allas! what have I do?
Tehee! quod she, and clapte the wyndow to.

That last wicked chortle is one of my favorite lines of poetry. I wish Chaucer were a terrific friend of mine and I could call him up on the phone whenever I felt like it.

Getting deeper into Lolita. Lo-lee-ta. Lo. Lee. Ta. God, it’s depraved. I didn’t remember all this cruelty.