Red Cheshire, Red Plenty

1. T.S. Eliot ordering cheese (full passage here, incl. arguably juicier bits, quoted from the excellent Eliot chapter in The Pound Era; includes notes about "jugged hare" (I cannot abide cheese and do not usually come upon these assortments, but as of late last year I know what Kenner is talking about)):

With the side of his knife blade he commenced tapping the circumference of the cheese, rotating it, his head cocked in a listening posture. It is not possible to swear that he was listening. He then tapped the inner walls of the crater. He then dug about with the point of his knife amid the fragments contained by the crater. He then said, “Rather past its prime. I am afraid I cannot recommend it.” [...]

The Stilton vanished. After awing silence the cheese board arrived, an assortment of some half-dozen, a few of them identifiably cheeses only in context. One resembled sponge cake spattered with chocolate sauce. Another, a pockmarked toadstool-yellow, exuded green flecks. Analysis and comparison: he took up again his knife, and each of these candidates he tapped, he prodded, he sounded. At length he segregated a ruddy specimen. “That is a rather fine Red Cheshire … which you might enjoy.”

Have come to realize that "flecks" is one of my very favorite words; I attribute this to the part of my sensibility that is inherited from the fat boy in Dickens.

2. Yeats attempts to eat spaghetti, recounted by Richard Aldington (via Calista):

William Butler Yeats and his wife once dined with me at my hotel in Rapallo. Spaghetti was served, and a long thin lock of Yeats’s hair got into the corner of his mouth, while the rest of us watched in silent awe his efforts to swallow a bit of his own hair instead of the pasta. Giving up this hopeless task, in dudgeon he suddenly turned to me and said in a deep voice: ‘How do you account for Ezra?

3. Edward Gorey's literary tastes are like mine. (But it seems Zeitgeisty to like Browne -- perhaps because of Rings of Saturn? though in my case the actual stimulus was the epigraph to Styron's Lie Down in Darkness -- and Twitter has lately thrown up more links to Basil Bunting than one would expect absent a Trend of some sort...)

4. Crooked Timber is doing an event on Spufford's Red Plenty. (See here for previous local coverage.)

Endangered species of do(ugh)nut, etc.

(I should apologize, this is another one of those lists, hated by Dice, in which one of the items is undesirably bloated and should have been a separate post.)

1. Heather McHugh, "Tiny Étude on the Poetic Line" (sorry about the ellipses but the original suffers from an overdose of overwriting, although I cannot figure out how best to pare it down):

A poem can be construed as a drama of a sort, set not merely against a vacuum [...] but also against a great babble of presumption, anticipation, commonplace, chatter, twitter, and byte—a deafening background noise brought to the poem by the audience, by the very nature of its conventions, its automatons of memory and mind.

The world of common expectations (the fabric of our sense of the "usual" [...]) supplies the circumstantial volume: it is brought by every reader to every act of language. Poetic acts contend with that circumstance, that source material, its overdose of underwriting.

Cf. Geoffrey Hill on the "grading and measuring of words" (a memorable phrase but I should correct the attribution; it was actually Hill quoting Pound). I am reminded of Kenner on WCW:

Williams' effort was to revise out of sight, not the fact that pains had been taken, but the fact that there even had been a poet. [...] Spontaneity is both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to imitate, and art's vocation is always to do the hard way what is being done easily. 

And then there is the related notion, suggested (and stated, perhaps?) in The Pound Era, of the modernist poem as bearing the same relation to the unearthed Greek fragment as, e.g., Pope's epistles bear to actual letters -- in either case it is eventually somewhat like a passport or a check or a sliver of soot-encrusted marble, an innocuous quotidian object that reveals its watermarks, its structure of nodes and veins, when held against the light. (There is much else to be said about all of this; I haven't the time right now; but one should at least mention Kermode on Marianne Moore:

Moore once remarked that ‘prose is a step beyond poetry . . . and then there is another poetry that is a step beyond that’: you had to go through prose to come out the other side purged of that disposable prior poetry, with its irrelevant inversions and its subjection to conventional rhythms.)

2. Calista follows up on the dialect-dictionary digging in the prev. post (with "snuit", "smoo" &c.!). Here is yet another entry of particular virtue:

3. Elif Batuman, in the New Yorker (article, like most of her Turkish pieces, pedestrian and not recommended on the whole), on food exploration:

he has rescued from obscurity various wild greens, sausages, yogurts, and cheeses. In Erzurum, he once discovered a forgotten kind of doughnut.

(Via Sarah Emily Duff's new tumblr)


4. For the commonplace book, a v. good line from Coleridge's letters:

Of Parentheses I may be too fond--and will be on my guard in this respect--. But I am certain that no work of impassioned and eloquent reasoning ever did or could subsist without them--They are the drama of Reason--and present the thought growing, instead of a mere Hortus siccus.

5. Yet another precursor (found randomly) of a famous line in Keats.