What a Hotchpotch!

One of my all - time favorite abandoned houses!

"I . . . stared out of the train window.
Like a colossal junkyard, the swamps
and back lots of Connecticut flashed past,
one broken-down fragment
bearing no relation to another.

What a hotchpotch the world was!"

from The Bell Jar ~ by Sylvia Plath
(p 112; beginning of Chapter 10)

**************

That's me: just longing, as does Sylvia Plath,
for a bit more tidyness in this messy world,
and filled with dismay to witness these grand
old houses, so sadly neglected and in need of TLC.

Could we ever make it look like this instead?

Other side . . . hotchpotch . . .

VS Dream House!

As Gerry and I have recently learned in our quest to improve distressed aging houses, it turns out that back in the days when a public sewer system first became available in Lafayette, homeowners could OPT OUT of public safety and cleanliness. If participating in a community health initiative seemed too costly or socialist to them, they could "have their freedoms" to maintain a private sewer line, right in the middle of a city block that was otherwise entirely connected to the city mains! Can you imagine the current state of these 100+ year old private lines? Nasty is an understatement! If only there had been a "sewer mandate" we wouldn't still be dealing with this problem today.

Insult to Injury: Even though we are blessed with outdoor swim weather here in Indiana well into October, there is a chronic shortage of outdoor swimming pools in our area. One of my favorites was recently sold and bulldozed over, and guess what was built in its place? Storage units! Makes me so sad and angry to see the storage of unused crap prioritized over sunshine, clean water, and exercise -- on prime real estate, at a a major intersection in Lafayette. What a hotchpotch!

[A few more favorites in the neighborhood.]

P.S. 2023
Look whose recent use "hodgepodge"
echoes Plath's use -- 60 years ago! -- of "hotchpotch":

"During a recent tour of Xiongan New Area, a city roughly 60 miles south of Beijing, President Xi Jinping told the state-owned news agency Xinhua he opposes street stalls. 'The capital is first and foremost a political center, not a hodgepodge. It cannot run factories in alleys or engage in a street-stall economy,' he said." ~quoted in The Daily Upside

Asking Little or Nothing

Elegant and mystical . . .

. . . just like Sylvia Plath's poem!
Notice how the mushrooms speak for themselves:

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

American poet, Sylvia Plath
October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For more about mushrooms
see my recent post

"The Miracle of Mushrooms"

@ The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Photo credit: Beata Ribeiro
taken in Poland ~ September 2018

Writer's Tears

No, whiskey is not my favorite,
but I am partial to this name!
I asked Regen, one of the owners of our favorite neighborhood bistro ~ Town & Gown ~ if she and her husband Matt, who's from Ireland, carried this brand of whiskey in their bar. I told her that I was curious just because I liked the name of it, and she said:

"Me too! When the salesman first showed me this
product, I said 'Writer's Tears!' Sign me up!"
Haha! You can see why I like it there! They think like I do! I still haven't actually tried it though, so I have no idea how it tastes, but it might be good as a prop when reading an Irish novel!

Or an American novel:

Ordering drinks always floored me. I didn't know whisky from gin and never managed to get anything I really liked the taste of. Buddy Willard and the other college boys I knew were usually too poor to buy hard liquor or they scorned drinking altogether. It's amazing how many college boys don't drink or smoke. I seemed to know them all. The farthest Buddy Willard ever went was buying us a bottle of Dubonnet, which he only did because he was trying to prove he could be aesthetic in spite of being a medical student.

"I'll have a vodka," I said.

The man looked at me more closely. "With anything?"

"Just plain," I said. "I always have it plain."

I thought I might make a fool of myself by saying I'd have it with ice or gin or anything. I'd seen a vodka ad once, just a glass full of vodka standing in the middle of a snowdrift in a blue light, and the vodka looked clear and pure as water, so I thought having vodka plain must be all right. My dream was someday ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful. . . .

The drinks arrived, and mine looked clean and pure, just like the vodka ad. . . .

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower's sword and made me feel powerful and godlike. (10, 11, 12)

from The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath

Or a short story:

"Anis del Toro. It's a drink."
"Could we try it?"
The man called "Listen" through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
"Four reales."
"We want two Anis del Toro."
"With water?"
"Do you want it with water?"
"I don't know," the girl said. "Is it good with water?"
"It's all right."
"You want them with water?" asked the woman.
"Yes, with water."
"It tastes like licorice," the girl said and put the glass down.
"That's the way with everything."
"Yes," said the girl. "Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe."

from "Hills Like White Elephants"
by Ernest Hemingway

************

"You're a writer; you're supposed to be sad."

What, after all, is a writer's life without a dose of despair?
from Dear Committee Members (p 68)
by Julie Schumacher

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing
is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
Tom Waits

“I drank to drown my sorrows,
but the damned things learned how to swim.”
Frida Kahlo

Meme ~ The Scariest Halloween

The New Yorker ~ Ha

Old Letters & Notebooks

"Ribbons . . . pages of an old love letter . . ."

Burning The Letters

I made a fire; being tired
Of the white fists of old
Letters and their death rattle
When I came too close to the wastebasket
What did they know that I didn't?
Grain by grain, they unrolled
Sands where a dream of clear water
Grinned like a getaway car.
I am not subtle
Love, love, and well, I was tired
Of cardboard cartons the color of cement or a dog pack
Holding in it's hate
Dully, under a pack of men in red jackets,
And the eyes and times of the postmarks.

This fire may lick and fawn, but it is merciless:
A glass case
My fingers would enter although
They melt and sag, they are told
Do not touch.
And here is an end to the writing,
The spry hooks that bend and cringe and the smiles, the smiles
And at least it will be a good place now, the attic.
At least I won't be strung just under the surface,
Dumb fish
With one tin eye,
Watching for glints,
Riding my Arctic
Between this wish and that wish.

So, I poke at the carbon birds in my housedress.
They are more beautiful than my bodiless owl,
They console me--
Rising and flying, but blinded.
They would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels
Only they have nothing to say but anybody.
I have seen to that.
With the butt of a rake
I flake up papers that breathe like people,
I fan them out
Between the yellow lettuces and the German cabbage
Involved in it's weird blue dreams
Involved in a foetus.
And a name with black edges

Wilts at my foot,
Sinuous orchis
In a nest of root-hairs and boredom--
Pale eyes, patent-leather gutturals!
Warm rain greases my hair, extinguishes nothing.
My veins glow like trees.
The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like
A read burst and a cry
That splits from it's ripped bag and does not stop
With that dead eye
And the stuffed expression, but goes on
Dyeing the air,
Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water
What immortality is. That it is immortal.

by Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Coming across an old college notebook of American Poetry,
I rediscovered the above poem; my long - long lost favorites
from Joyce Carol Oates, and my hand - copied Larry Levis
selections, along with numerous others.
Additional Discoveries

For a few more examples, see my latest post:

He Said She Said

@ The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Had We Only Known

"May this year bring us before it has flown
All we would have wished for had we only known."

New Year's Day Dusk
Brace yourself for an Ominous New Year!
(across the street & up the mountain from our house)

I shared this poem a year ago; here it is again!
I see now that it is one to re-read annually:

Another Year

Another year gone and the old man with the scythe
Is mowing closer. He hasn’t been subtle, has he.
Too many good people gone, and I could sit and cry
For them except that you look exceptionally snazzy
Despite the miles on your odometer,
As if you have a few more aces up your sleeve,
Maybe you were born under a lucky comet or
Maybe it’s the wine, but I do believe
When I look at you and take your hand you’re
Positively glowing. Maybe we’ve been sorry a
Long enough time and now we get some grandeur
And do our dance and sing our aria.
May this year bring us before it has flown
All we would have wished for had we only known.

by Gary Johnson
Contemporary American Poet

Our front porch on New Year's Eve Day
Lightning, thunder, rain, sun, all within a few minutes!

Monday, January 3rd
Brilliant sun and whirlwind snow all at once!
By nightfall, totally clear for viewing of
Crescent Moon, Venus, and Saturn.

As with Gary Johnson's "Another Year,"
this poem has appeared previously;
but from here on out, I plan to re-read it
not only at Thanksgiving, but
at the beginning of every strange new year . . .

Minnesota Thanksgiving

For that free Grace bringing us past great risks
& thro' great griefs surviving to this feast
sober & still, with the children unborn and born,
among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt
and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude.

We praise our ancestors who delivered us here
within warm walls all safe, aware of music,
likely toward ample & attractive meat
with whatever accompaniment
Kate in her kind ingenuity has seen fit to devise,

and we hope - across the most strange year to come -
continually to do them and You not sufficient honour
but such as we become able to devise
out of decent or joyful conscience & thanksgiving.
Yippee!
Bless then, as Thou wilt, this wilderness board.

by John Berryman, 1914 - 1972

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Along with my foreboding sense of an ominous,
strange year to come, I add this observation:

"What a hotchpotch the world was!"

I am beginning to think that this line from The Bell Jar
is the most important sentence that Sylvia Plath every wrote.