Modern times

Yesterday I called them to straighten something out. Their machine immediately told me how proud they were to serve me, then put me on a five minute hold. During the five minutes they renewed their welcome every thirty seconds or so. At the end of that time they switched me to another program asking how much I loved the service. After telling them insofar as their questions allowed how I didn't love it at all the line went dead. Five minutes invested in banging my head against a stone wall. Ah, modern timnes.

Bon appétit

Did you read Calvin Trillin's recent piece on Mosca's restaurant, outside New Orleans. Here are some of the dishes he savored.



Shrimp Mosca
Serves two to four


Ingredients
2 lbs. large, whole fresh shrimp
¾ cup olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. rosemary
3 bay leaves
6-10 cloves unpeeled garlic, mashed
½ cup dry white wine
Procedures
1. Place all ingredients except wine into a large skillet.
2. Cook over medium-high heat for fifteen to twenty minutes or until the shrimp are pink and the liquid produced by the shrimp has almost completely disappeared.
3. Stir occasionally.
4. Reduce the heat and add the wine.
5. Cook at a low simmer until the liquid is reduced by half, about five to seven minutes.
6. Serve the shrimp hot with the pan juices.


Chicken a la Grande
Serves two to four


Ingredients
3-lb. chicken, cut into eighths
¾ cup olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
6-10 cloves unpeeled garlic, mashed
1 tsp. rosemary
1 tsp. oregano
½ cup dry white wine
Procedures
1. Heat olive oil in large skillet until hot.
2. Add chicken pieces.
3. Turn chicken often, cooking until browned.
4. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper.
5. Add garlic, rosemary, and oregano, stirring to distribute seasonings.
6. Pour the white over the chicken and simmer until the wine is reduce by half.
7. Serve chicken hot with pan juices.

Chicken Cacciatore
Serves two to four

Ingredients
3 lb. chicken cut into eighths
¾ cup olive oil
1 tsp. fresh ground black pepper
6-10 cloves unpeeled garlic, mashed
1 tsp. rosemary
1 tsp. oregano
½ cup dry white wine
1 ½ cup tomato sauce
Salt to taste
Procedures
1. Heat olive oil in large skillet until hot.
2. Add chicken pieces.
3. Turn chicken often, cooking until browned.
4. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper.
5. Add garlic, rosemary, and oregano, stirring to distribute seasonings.
6. Remove the pan from the stove; pour the wine over the chicken.
7. Add the tomato sauce.
8. Return to heat.
9. Simmer ten to fifteen minutes until wine and tomato sauce has blended and thickened.

Roasted Potatoes
Serves six

Ingredients
7-8 peeled potatoes, halved
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. rosemary
½ cup chopped onion
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed
½ cup olive oil
½ cup dry white wine
2 cups water
Procedures
1. Place potatoes in eight-inch-square baking dish. Sprinkle salt, pepper, oregano, rosemary, and onion over potatoes.
2. Add crushed garlic.
3. Pour olive oil, wine and water over top of potatoes.
4. Cover baking dish with foil.
5. Place in 450-degree oven for one hour.
6. Remove foil and bake another thirty minutes or until brown.

Motion and Stillness

Last few days rabidly social: two book signings, Grace Paley annual reading, Bagel Bards, evening with Brooklkine poet friends. Next Monday we head up to the Adirondacks for a Christmas week. Almost always, as I step out of the car I feel layers of tension melt away. Ah, a life of just looking around at snow in trees, mountains coming in and out of clouds, snow falling, the excellent company of my sister-in-law, who is the very spirit of the mountains.

Off the Grid matters move like a string of train cars in a switching yard -- a few steps forward, a few back, big clanks, big silences in between. We're still short the money we need to launch the contest, and every week the complications of the project reveal themselves. But I still expect to announce our contest this spring. I'm very set on building something tht, if anything is, might still be around in another ten years.

Bright moments: how alive Grace remains in her work. And, ah, scenes, inhaling their neighbor's honey-cured bacon through a hole in the wall, making her scatter breakfast with Bob "more grand."

Listening to a former president of Smith introduce the reading by our friend (and OTG board member) Gwen Jensen-- and find her so down to earth. And Keven Bowen's easy, egoless eloquence in his intro to the Payley reading. And hearing Gwen read from poems in which Tam was deeply involved, and Allen West, our most recent OTG poet, read poems that Tam and I saw through to a book.

Miracle Cure

I've been coughing and hawking since the end of a three-week cold. This morning I drank a tsp of honey and three tbsps of cider vinegar. Viva la difference!

Who Makes the Rules

Dear Paolo, Maybe it's time to drop this, but I think we're both the kind of guys who need to have the last word, even when there is no last word. As for the difficulties of politicians and diplomats, I don't seem them having difficulties. They know who they're working for. When the billionaires say, no, we can't continue unemployment benefits, etc., etc., because that would cut down on our billions, people just seem to not their heads to some kind of higher wisdom. They want to "obey the rules," apparently, no matter how destructive those rules are to their well-being. To me, the USA is a nearly pure plutocracy, and, owning most of the money, they also own most of the media, without which it would be much harder to make people believe lies. I agree, there are good billionaires and pols out there, but they're exceptions. The rule is corruption.

Love,


Bert

The spoon:
A lesson on how consultants can make a difference in an organization.


Last week, we took some friends to a new restaurant, 'Steve's Place,' and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket.


It seemed a little strange. When the busboy brought our water and utensils, I observed that he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket.


Then I looked around and saw that all the staff had spoons in their pockets. When the waiter came back to serve our soup I inquired, 'Why the spoon?'


'Well, 'he explained, 'the restaurant's owner hired Andersen Consulting to revamp all of our processes. After several months of analysis, they concluded that the spoon was the most frequently dropped utensil. It represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour.


If our personnel are better prepared, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 15 man-hours per shift.'

As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon and he replaced it with his spare. 'I'll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen instead of making an extra trip to get it right now.' I was impressed.


I also noticed that there was a string hanging out of the waiter's fly.


Looking around, I saw that all of the waiters had the same string hanging from their flies. So, before he walked off, I asked the waiter, 'Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?'


'Oh, certainly!' Then he lowered his voice. 'Not everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also learned that we can save time in the restroom.


By tying this string to the tip of our you-know-what, we can pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the restroom by 76.39%.'


I asked quietly, 'After you get it out, how do you put it back?'


'Well,' he whispered, 'I don't know about the others, but I use the spoon.'

Interval

An elderly gent is poking in his closet, looking for a beloved pair of brown oxfords. He pokes and he pokes and then it dawns on him. He took them to a shoemaker to resole twenty-nine years go but forgot to pick them up. But he remembers the name of the shoemaker and, lo, there's the address in the book. So he drives over, steps in, and, yes, he even remembers the shoemaker, though he's older now.

"Look," the guy says, "you're going to think I'm crazy, but after twenty-nine years I just remembered, I brought a pair of brown oxfords here twenty-nine years ago to be resoled, and then forgot to pick them up. I don't suppose there's any chance that you have them?"

Without batting an eye the shoemaker goes to the back room, and he's gone a long time. But then he comes back and tells the guy, "Sure, I still got 'em." The guy's so tickled he can hardly contain himself. What glorious karma, for them to be still there. "Great," he says, "can I have them?" The shoemaker thinks for a moment. then, "Sure you can have 'em. They'll be ready Thursday afternoon."

Something Borrowed

Yesterday afternoon, as I was walking up steep School Street Hill, a likely lad was plunging down on his bike, his hands dancing high over his head. Me oh my, as a whiff of his energy coursed through me!

Sauce

Today I'm thinking of last night's lamb stew. The key is rosemary and white wine, but lacking wine I used saki instead. Flour the lamb and brown it. Sauté abundant onions and carrots. How much flour you allow into the sauté determines thinness or thickness. Some add tomatoes and tomato paste. No time. I stick to the way the French make it, though I also put potatoes in. Balance the veggies strongly against the meat. Help the lamb forgive you.

Today spaghetti sauce with sausage. With plenty of oregano and capers. Black olives if I have them. Red wine, which I do have. Sauté onions and carrots. Brown sausage meat out of the skin. Canned tomatoes, tomato sauce. I haven't cut an onion yet, or browned a sausage, but I smell the sauce.

Today, poetry sauce is Sir Walter Ralegh's translation of Aeneid, vi,724-7, in Raleigh's History of the world:

The heauen, the earth, and all the liquid mayne,
The Moones bright Globe, and Starres Titanian,
A spirit which through each part infus'd doth passe.
Fashions, and workes, and wholly doth transpierce
All this great body of the Vniuerse.

China

In 1984-85 my family and I lived on the campus of Peking University, where I was teaching. During that year I regularly visited a 97-year-old American who had been in China continually since 12923, a year after the Chinese Communist Party was formed. Fascinated with the stories he told me, some of them coherent, some not, I launched a research project that continued after I returned to the States and through a second visit to China to attend his 100th birthday celebration, followed in tend days by his death. Winter's story is that of a sensitive and keen participant observer who puts his listener/reader in touch with both the nuances of Chinese social life and also the violence of China's modern history.

Now, through a series of karmic coincidences, I am excited to be working with the manuscript again.

Day after Thanksgiving

At the dinner table last night at my daughter's home, with a wildly diverse bunch of people, including a macho sheriff, I ate what maybe the biggest meal in my life. A heaping plate and then a second heaping plate. That's not usual for me. I'd fasted the day before and maybe that explains it. But I've gotta admit that the second plateful was as good as the first.

Two of my three children were the red. So good simply to enjoy them. And my grandson, now almost eleven, who holds a very big warm place in my life. How could I not be thankful, basking in the warmth of a peaceful family.

How about this -- opening poem in Jerry Rothenberg's Cincealments & Caprichos

THE SLEEP OF REASON

for Clayton Eshelman


Words imprinted on a sign
by Goya glowing
white against a surface
nearly white:
"the sleep of reason
that produces monsters."
He is sitting on a chair
his head slumped
resting on his arms
or on the marble table,
pencil set aside,
his night coat open
thighs exposed.
All things that fly at night
fly past him.Wings that brush an ear,
an ear concealed,
a memory beginning
in the house of sleep.
His is a world where owls
live in palm trees,
where a shadow in the sky
is like a magpie,
white & black are colors
only in the mind,
the cat you didn't murder
springs to life,
a whistle whirling in a cup,
gone & foregone,
a chasm bright with eyes.
There is a cave in Spain,
a feral underworld,
where bats are swarming
among bulls,
the blackness ending in a wall
his hands rub up against, a blind man in a painted world,
amok and monstrous
banging on a rock.

Nuthin' Much

Nobody's asking me for a diary, but I'm enjoying this. Yesterday, in conversation with a friend at the Rockefeller Archives, a project I'd put aside some twenty years ago leaped back into life, and I had a chance to reflect on the odd twists of kharma. I say "reflect," but that suggests an insight, something profound. No, just the same old same old: things come and go, and once in the while some unhatched egg stirs and there's the chipping beak and then the peep peep. Now I can only wait to see if a chicken is to follow.

Now that I'm beginning to grow up at the age of 80, I find that I have a gift of gratitude that often enough shapes my days. No point listing all that I have to be grateful for including family, which I didn't properly value in the past. And also the grace of awakening each morning with the feeling that I can help make the day interesting and loving.

a herring

I promised jokes. Here's a joke I think of as hermetic, because only old school Jews get it.

Two old friends, out of the same shtetl, met a couple of times a week for tea in Manhattan, always the same time, same place. Sp they're sitting there, as they always did, staring into their tea cups because everything they had to talk about they'd already talked about. Finally, one of them looks up, still a little dreamy from the tea steam but rising on the wings of an idea. "Okay, Shimel" he says, "wot's green and you hang it on the vall and it vistles."

Shimel is still mostly in his tea cup, but slowly he raises his head, half dazed, half quzzical, and says, "Green, you hang it on the vall and it vistles? How should I know because there's no such thing. C'mon, you tell me." So Chaim, the first man, replies, "A herring." Shimel's astonished. ""A herring?! A herring is green?" Chaim says, so you pain it green." "Okay, okay, a herring, a herring hangs on the vall?" Chaim, simply, "So you hang it on the vall?" Now Shimel is getting exasperated. "So now you gung tell me a herring vistles?!" Chaim lets the moment hang, then, "So it doesn't visel."

Stone Soup

Last week I read at the Out of the Blue Gallery in the Stone Soup series. Jack Powers was very much present, though he died more than a month ago. He continues to be a good presiding spirit, as does Chad Parentau, who has been running the series for five years. For me, the evening had a couple of highlights. On the open mike John Stern perfectly recited poems ranging from Emma Lazarus through Shakespeare to Robert W. Service -- all paramount recitations, the spirit of the words perfectly embodied in John's voice and gestures that changed from poem to poem. To hear John's Lazrus is like hearing the Statue of Liberty speaking. Also at the open Mike was the inimical Billy Barnum. Toothless, spastic, dressed in a witch's brew of exotic clothes and drapery, Billy recited an allegorical poem of his in which a male erotic figure visits a female loneliness. The language, as it usually is with Billy, was inspired, and his body movements were hypnotizing grace. Out of the Blue, host of three series that I know, can sometimes feel like the wild west, but it can also be the scene of astonishing performances.

Last night, with a class of men on probation out of Dorchester District Court, I took part in a remarkable discussion of the Tolstoy story, "Korney Vasielevitch." The story is about a rich man hungry for more, who, returning from a business trip, finds that his wife has been cheating on him. Under real provocation by her taunts, he falls into a rage, beats her savagely, and also permanently cripples the arm of their young daughter when she stands between him and his wife. Korney leaves the house the next morning and for seventeen years wanders deeper and deeper into denigration. At the end of that time, a drunken tram still driven by rage against his wife, he returns home. What follows is a drama of forgiveness that contains a range of moral subtleties not easily resolved.

The men were magnificent, not only interpreting and asking just the right questions, but also seeing the analogies to their own lives. One of the subjects that came up is whether everyone has a core of goodness, no matter how veiled. For eight weeks, through the course, the men have been rediscovering their own goodness, and it was a remarkable occasion to feel how much that discovery was in the air.

itting Bottom

Last night, with a class of men on probation out of Dorchester District Court, I took part in a remarkable discussion story, "Korney Vasielevitch." The story is about a rich man hungry for more, who, returning from a business trip, finds that his wife has been cheating on him. Under real provocation by her taunts, he falls into a rage, beats her savagely, and also permanently cripples the arm of their young daughter when she stands between him and his wife. Korney leaves the house the next morning and for seventeen years wanders deeper and deeper into denigration. At the end of that time, a drunken tram still driven by rage against his wife, he returns home. What follows is a drama of forgiveness that contains a range of moral subtleties not easily resolved.

The men were magnificent, not only interpreting and asking just the right questions, but also seeing the analogies to their own lives. One of the subjects that came up is whether everyone has a core of goodness, no matter how veiled. For eight weeks, through the course, the men have been rediscovering their own goodness, and it was a remarkable occasion to feel how much that discovery was in the air.

For five years Tam Lin Neville have edited Off the Grid Press. We've published five books, two of which have won significant prizes, and all of which have received national attention. Now we are in the process of becoming a non-profit company, and we are now raising money to launch our first contest. We plan to publish two books a year by poets over sixty.

This move allows us to enter the mainstream of poetry presses, and, with the help of a strong board whose members are Lee Sharkey, Gwen Swenson, Roger Mitchell, Alex Neville, and Kevin McCrea, we anticipate a lively future.

Jewish Book World ( Spring 2010): Review of Bert Stern's poetry collection "Steerage"

JEWISH BOOK WORLD (SPRING 2010)
POETRY

REVIEW: STEERAGE BY BERT STERN ( Ibbetson Street Press—2009)


Like children of the Holocaust, those whose parents suffered from pogroms or who were forced from their homeland because of religious persecution carry the scars forever. The cost of such escape never seems to leave Bert Stern, one example of an adult son who knows, as he states so directly in “Lotty is Born.” “…let him tell me if they can/if I am recompense for what they endured.” The remaining five parts of this notable collection might be described as an appreciation of beauty and fragility of life thereafter. In the title poem, Stern notes the full effect of such survival, “…he said what he hoped, / as if God gave us life/as we want it. But order is like houses children weave from grasses, twigs/and leaves.” Nature as it appears in upstate Buffalo, New York is a repeated mirror image of deep beauty and death, with the latter being existentially, not morbidly, depicted. One other outstanding poem is “Midrash: Abraham” in which after his son remains after the great sacrifice “…broken there, complete and alone, /bent by perfection.” Steerage is a celebration of new life forever reviewed by the past.

--Deborah Schoeneman

**** To order “Steerage” by Bert Stern go to Amazon.com