My Farmers' Market

Yesterday morning I went to the local farmers' market in Canton where I live. Many cities have them these days. They provide fresh produce for less than the corporate chains--even if they are unionized--are able to do. Because I wasn't there at the opening hour, the couple I buy from was already sold out of organic vegetables. They had lots of herbs left, but I have those.

So I tried some new booths, asking at each one if they sold organics. Most of them said the same thing: it takes years to become certified by government agencies to say they are organic farmers, but they avowed that they used organic compost to plant in and didn't spray.

I decided to trust them because when I eat in a restaurant, regardless of how good the food is, I have no idea where the food comes from or how it's been raised. At one booth, I buy red potatoes, the small ones for potato salad. At the next one, an old Amish couple sell me golden tomatoes and bright purple bean they promise will turn jade green when I cook them. New colors for familiar vegetables. Children could string the beans and wear them around their necks.

One thing I like about the market is how people come downtown. How they talk, interact, listen to the weekly musician. This week it was a guy in a pork pie hat playing saxaphone to a prerecorded sound system. Across the street there is a yoga class stretching on the grass. Half a dozen dogs are there. But no one has set out water for them. And there are no authorities--the police only show up at night events. Maybe they think crime sleeps in on Saturday mornings, or stays in to watch cartoons.

After I get home, I pull cookbooks off the shelf. Shopping this way makes me aware of how local food is seasonal. This week I will eat what is ripe, right here. I can always make a soup, curry or an etoufee. An Italian cookbook gives me a recipe for steamed beans tossed in olive oil with tomato bits and fresh basil and oregano, I have those things, and will add some goat cheese. For the potatoes, after I boil them, I'll add a cream sause with jalapeno pepper and curry. I have a loaf of French batard from Hazel Artisan Bakery in North Canton, and half a bottle of Chilean Cabernet.

When all is ready to eat, I'll use my internet to get a Latin salsa channel, and read a book, maybe the one on Hemingway in Cuba. How ironic that all this is available to the remains of the middle class life in America because we are the ruling empire. It's not ironic that it's a hard concept to digest.

Reinvention

Are boundaries fixed or are they moveable? A man crosses a border, moves to a new land, takes up the language. Even his name sounds different in the new tongue. Is he the same man when John becomes Juan, Sean, Ian, or Ivan?

Once the world had been mapped, space was the new frontier (frontera meaning border). But we can see our own house from space on Google maps.

Maybe the next frontier is interior. Was this what James Joyce understood, why he wrote those interior narratives, his stream of consciousness? Inside I can reinvent my outside. Interior fashion. Interior make-over. Detailing, glossing, re-naming.

You become the person who attends the reunion incognito. You become Mr. X, the Unknown One. Not personality theft but identity migration. Identity expatriots in a common world.

Hope

From Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms:
The Italian Priest (first voice) talking with the American who is an officer in the Italian army:

"There are people who would make war. In this country there are many like that. There are other people who would not make war."
"But the first ones make them do it."
"Yes."
"And I help them."
"You are a foreigner. You are a patriot."
"And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it?"
"I do not know."
He looked out the window again. I watched his face.
"Have they ever been able to stop it?"
"They are not organized to stop things and when they get organized their leaders sell them out."
"Then it's hopeless?"
"It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot."
"Maybe the war will be over."
"I hope so."

Travel

What is it about travel? The desire for the new? Mobility? The thrilling alienation that comes from disrupting our routine?

I enjoy the rolling panorama of driving, the rush of airplanes on takeoff and looking down at the earth, the ferry leaving the dock and the water dividing at the bow. The sound of voices, the scent in the air (salt water, pine), the surprise of what's new.

What's local refreshes me. In Wisconsin I had a local stout made with smoked hops. In Paris my palate encountered jellied fish. In Mexico I ate pollo mole poblano that was like chocolate chicken (true!) in my mouth. In Toledo I enjoyed hand-made tortillas for the first time. In Cleveland I once drank a Hungarian wine that was pale green, sweet and quite delicious.

Carl Sandburg asks, "Where to? What next?" Good question. What's the good answer? Get out the atlas and the map.

I loved maps when I was a kid. I still do. My eyes scan the maps for highways, backroads, high elevations, unexpectedly crazy names, state lines, rivers, lakes (always the lakes). Campbell McGrath has a poem in Road Atlas in which he imagines trying to visit all the towns named Campbell or McGrath. I can't say for sure, but I bet there are more towns like Robertsville or Roberton than Miltnersburgh.

Next month I will be in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Already I am looking through the travel guides for old hotels and local mercado restaurants. When I travel I take in the world through my eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Don't just ask me what a place looked like--I'd rather tell you how it tastes.

Belle Lettres

Beautiful letters are more than fonts or calligraphy, though sans serif, old English, castellar, harrington, bradley hand, Bauhaus, Gill sans, goudy stout (draw me a pint), palatino linotype, trajan pro, or the like are all visually lovely.

While Belle Lettres has come to mean light, chatty, aesthetically celebratory writing (art over information), it has its origin in an inclusive categorical concept of literature. My dictionary tells me that it comes from the French, meaning about what it says: fine literature. Belletrists, then, write stylish pieces on literary or intellectual topics. What else would intellectuals do?

When I first came upon the term Belle Lettres when I was younger, I took it to mean a writer who was not restrictive to one area of writing only, since the term was often used to discuss how a novelist, say, would also write reviews, essays, social or political commentary, maybe poems, as well. I liked that idea. It somehow provided a shorthand for the concept of "the writers' writer," also used to describe someone who wrote well in all genre and subgenre, someone who seemed to approach it with the idea that if it has words, and I am a word artist (here is that aesthetic tic again), then I should try my hand (a pen or plume) or fingers (keyboard) at it. A Writer for All Genres. A belletrist.

But specialization has reigned this impulse in (a riding metaphor on a horserace day). Sadly? Nothing wrong with obsession or honing one's talent (as one sharpens a knife which is then used to cut a sharp new edge on the goose quill or plume so as to calligraph cleanly): practice makes perfect, or at least proficient writers.

Still, what is gained from range can be seen in production: hybridity, pastiche, send-up, creative non-fiction, brevities, impure forms, the poet-novelist-essayist-critic-reviewer-facebooker-blogger-belletrist. Compare the idea of biodiversity to the writer--must everyone have yards of grass? Consider the evolutionary concept that species adapt to habitat--must everyone inhabit single genre? How many tricks can the pony do?

Charles Olson wrote that form is nothing more than an extension of content. Could we say, then, that belletrism is an extension of form? And if so, in what genre might we compose our argument? Would we have the diverse experiences to create a new genre if needed to belletristically say it?

Hotel Utopia

I was delighted when I found out that Joseph Cornell, the artist who makes box art, lived on Utopia Freeway. Well of course he did. Shouldn't we all?

At one time I thought it wanted to have a political blog called Lefty's Bar & Grill. Porters would be on draft, maybe a chocolate stout. It would be located in the Hotel Utopia, and all my socialist and anarchist friends could sleep in the small rooms with the fabulous balconies for a song. But politics can wrap itself too easily around the heart. So Lefty's is boarded up, un-opened, still imagined, though the atomic jukebox is still plugged in to the wall.

It is good to have something to look forward to. After the revolution, we'll meet at Lefty's B&G, hoist some Edmund Fitzgeralds, and sing along with the Dropkick Murphys, Ashley Brooke Toussant, Favorite Saints, Erin Vaugh, or Jason Venner unplugged. But for now, welcome to the Hotel Utopia. Parking is free. And the rooms still use keys. How many stars, you ask? We are all stars at the Hotel Utopia.

To Begin With

While this feels like a Dear Diary entry, I begin to blog today.

Why not? Writing is just that, wherever it occurs. Whatever it says.

So: poem, story, novel, article, text, page, word, syntax, punctuation, grammar, thesaurus, notebook, paper scrap, the back of my hand in ink, each is a song it its own way.

So I begin with that/this/these.