For your children

Love is a beautiful game that spins
Into the world when the day begins

OR

Love is the beautiful game that spins
Into the world when a day begins

The Rhinecliff Arms

for Linda drinking champagne


Half Irish and Half Iroquois?
Half Elfin ... what I would have said:
Please (kiss me) Please? -- I'd call, but oy
My cell don't work at Jadis in
The shadow of Mt. Guardian

You looked so pretty in dark pink --
Dark hair dark eyes; you know I think
You're beautiful? Three girls
Were dancing near the fiddlers
While I watched: you, Linda, smile
While ordering your "usual" --
Champagne. Again.
You ate alone.

I can't find Rhinecliff, it's too far
to bike in winter, I should think -- nor
Can I teach you: How to plan
To find and keep a loving man?
Study "le Tantra?"? the Twilight
Language? of the Hudson going gray
On this chill early winter night
While children dance and fiddlers play ...

Old men can painfully regret
All things that have not happened yet:
(Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid)
All things the dear God will have made.

I know you know
Men may tell lies:
(the beauty I see in your eyes ...
reminds me of Mead's Meadow where
My glider rose while we all stared
To watch it flying out of sight)
(You know I really hoped you might)

I don't need sprightly Irish tunes
To know there'll be more Linda soon
Than drinking dry champagne alone ...
There will be children running home
To warm dark eyes, and to her stew
Of light and love and laughter too

Funny, isn't it, that we
Met for a moment, suddenly:
Me so homeless, you
So full of home ...?

I write sometimes about missing
Women I won't meet again --
(Who might have loved me?) Linda now

Don't cry; you were too young for me --
Despite which, I believed in thee

-- Christian Gehman

To Bean or Not to Bean?

Maybe it's like with Nachos .... and Real Nachos. Real Chili doesn't have beans. You might make some good beans maybe as a side dish to go near the Chili. And a pan of rice might be a good idea too -- especially if the Chili turns out hot as blazes. It's not difficult to make a passable beaned-up concoction, and evidently many people have gotten used to the taste of hamburger. I guess you can get used to anything. But. Hamburger is ground twice, with a fine blade. That's why it tastes like hamburger. Beef ground only once -- and through the coarsest chopper blade -- still tastes like beef. Most butchers will be happy to grind this for you -- ask for "chili grind, and please -- only put it through once." You will probably want to redistribute any large lumps of fat with a chopper.
Also, if you're going to make beaned up chili, probably with tomatoes in it -- at least start with dry beans and soak them overnight. You might try adding one can of refried beans just past the midway point. This will help create an unctuous, velvety mouthfeel. Please note that I approve neither of adding beans, nor of grinding the beef. Dare to make real Chili and serve beans on the side.
As to the spice blend, can you really do better than ancho chiles, cumin and salt? stewed with beef chunks? just until the beef is fall apart tender. Some folks -- and, I hear, even some Texans -- do implausibly insist on adding more vegetal ingredients like minced onion and garlic; but I don't believe they improve the real Chili.
Now, theoretically, it ought to be possible to make sort of a real Chili cassoulet annealed in a slow oven until the fat beef chunks, red kidney beans, ancho chiles, cumin, salt onion and garlic seem ready for the apocatastasis of posterity. But why add beans to the meat? Purists will still want their beans on the side. Maybe you could use two casseroles? The idea of using several kinds of meat, however -- beef, pork and sausage, maybe? -- is intriguing.
Making real Chili will help you transmute fact and legend into myth.
After all, isn't Chili cooking one of the arts where everything matters?
So maybe serving real chili to (literally) tasteless fools uninterested even in discussing the finer points of Chili theory, let alone the practice of making real Chili or in discussing great Chili moments of the past -- might be like watching the playoffs with idiots who -- perhaps because they have none themselves? -- have never learned to appreciate the way some moments in football, basketball or baseball show off the importance of real courage in the human soul.
Hey, thanks for sparking up my appetite .... again. -- Novelismo

Why I Love Brunettes

And really, it was all because of Sarah Doc had even met Roxana – at the opening party for the Photocrat Gallery. He came in late from showing Godard's Pierrot le Fou to the Kinokunst Gesellschaft, and plunged through the party crowd to the bar.

People were already dancing in a spotlight near the windows. Sarah, whirling in the swirl of dancers, was wearing a translucent milky green silk dress that made her look like a jade figurine. Sarah's hair was rumple cut so short, and dyed such a startling white – that she looked like the crazy blonde from Liquid Sky who kills men with her sex,  then prays the aliens will make their corpses disappear.

Drink in hand, Doc watched Sarah writhing slowly in the spotlight almost in Tom’s arms through a long country waltz. She went on writhing sinuously counter to the slow bass back-beat underpinning the acid rock spidery organ while Tom looked for a drink.

Bill was dancing with two very pretty girls, and near them, dancing with the other girls but not with Bill, was another girl who stopped Doc's heart.

Dark hair curled around her shoulders, plush and glossy, yet so dark you almost couldn't see it. His eyes drank in those headlands where so many sailors might yet drown.

He watched her amble toward the tape deck. Rummaging in her purse, she withdrew a cassette. And her brush. Waiting for what finally turned out to be an acid rock version of Elvis Presley’s song Suspicious Minds to end, she brushed her hair back several times. One ear gleamed through her dark hair like a bit of shell.

She put in a cassette.

The pipe band music from the Rio Chongo started gently with a steel drum tapping plink plink plink plink, and she started teaching Sarah how to dance what seemed at first an extra-syncopated samba. Doc, after learning the steps, soon realized all three girls were switching men.

At first he blamed that on his clumsiness in dancing, caused by the fact that he could hardly take his eyes off Roxana. Then he blamed it on the music, which at first confused him.

But what Doc liked about that crazy tikipan pipe music from the Rio Chongo – aside from how it made girls' breasts start jiggling – was how it kept on promising to let you dance forever; it kept whirling you away from Kansas in a swirl of ecstasy in some ways so much better than a love affair that soon you believed you could dance all night with the city lights stretched out like a carpet of stars toward Corcovado, so damn lovely … happily re-syncopating all the old steps you had learned imperfectly and changing partners with blithe innocence forever.

Of course, the music might not have done so much for Doc if Roxana hadn’t trained him to catch her properly whenever she twirled back into his arms – because she always smiled so happily whenever he did it right - and then just as Doc realized he had been dancing simultaneously with four beautiful women, the Rio Chongo flowed home to the sea and the whole extravaganza faded slowly with the pipe band plink plink plinking as the steam yacht full of dancers, hull down, hooted gently over what we may as well call:

Just another lost horizon.

And now think of toffee, caramel: the scent of chocolate, coffee, cinnamon, the smell of poplar honey in the jar, Roxana's dark brown kindly eyes, Earth Mother, Pocahontas, "brown-eyed girl." The way her nipples crinkle dark brown during sex . The deep sun colored brown of beach girls wearing string bikinis; banks of brown-red loam, brown windrowed autumn leaves burning on a clear day with a plume of smoke and red small flames in clusters on the pile. Espresso sugared in the cup. Amontillado. Guinness. Jameson. A roast goose with browned potatoes. Her wet hair mahogany and ancho chilis and a grazing dark bay mare.

She'll be the one you always wanted and the one you really miss.

And what can any blonde be, really, but the after-image, pale and hazy, of which a brunette is the original?

Art

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."

— Henry James, to H.G. Wells

Memory

"I have balanced all my books, my will is made. Only I have nothing to leave -- save to you, to whom I now leave all that is mine in the world -- my memory."

—Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Nature of A Crime

Illegal Dreams

"Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an 'illegal dream.' He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams."

— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

Love

"Love is like a journey in mountainous country, up through the clouds, and down into the shadows to an unknown destination."

— Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, Romance

My Library

You can see my Google Books library, which includes links to Kinglake's History of the Crimean War and Abbe Huc's Travels in Tartary by clicking the link below.

http://books.google.com/books?as_list=BDW28DdMQ7fi2mK2YxIkvGhRdNxrwz_qpEBcKMWowCubGZGEXUA

Youth

“Youth is the only season for enjoyment, and the first twenty-five years of one’s life are worth all the rest of the longest life of man, even though these five and twenty be spent in penury and contempt, and the rest in the possession of wealth, honour, respectability, ay, and many of them in strength and health. . . .”

— George Borrow, The Romany Rye

Why We Write

“If I knew myself better I wouldn't have to write books.”

— Sybille Bedford, quoted by Andrew Barrow

The Independent, May 23, 2004

First Post

"As for the story itself it is true enough in its essentials. The sustained invention of a really telling lie demands a talent which I do not possess."

— Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest

"As to Karain, nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all—failure and death; but his quality was to appear clothed in the illusion of unavoidable success."

— Joseph Conrad, "Karain," Tales of Unrest