For years I had Alice's Restaurant and Tom's Diner confused as the same song.
So, if I'm reading this right, Guthrie polluted a bunch of land by dumping his hippie commune trash on it, got busted, then he went and complained about being arrested for that. Then he tries to say he got out of the draft from that arrest. None of that is true, he was 1A, available for military service. But he had a high draft number.
For those of you who don't know, the draft was basically a lottery, you got a random number based on your birthday that determined which people would get called on to go fight a war. Guthrie was not going to get drafted no matter what and he knew that.
Even the Burroughs prayer would be a better Thanksgiving tradition that that. I'll go listen to that now.
hoity toity, OK. I am [sob] sitting all alone but for the cat, while Ume looks after her mother. But I do not grudge the sentimental customs of the tribe. And the cat and I have a fire blazing, and music, so I might dial down the self pity for a while.
4. You people and your War on Thanksgiving ...
Admittedly, this Thanksgiving tale could have been told with more fidelity to literal fact, the way we do with the Christmas and Easter stories. But some holiday traditions are meant to be taken humorously, not literally.
What next Kadence? Are you going to tell us that Jimi Hendrix never actually kissed the sky, and that Levon Helm's brother didn't fight in the Civil War? That Johnny Cash didn't shoot a man in Reno?
Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno, but he had a very good reason.
>> Didn't Burroughs kill his wife?
Yeah he did. Shot her in the head. Celebrated beat author.
Keb Mo sings it they say I shot a man in Reno, but that was just a lie.
Celebrated beat author.
Now celebrated by almost no one, since who even reads the Beats anymore? But yikes! I did not know he had killed his wife.
I still read Burroughs every once in a while. Still read Exterminator!. Haven't read Kerouac in forever, should I? Don't read Ginsburg or Ginsberg.
O.J. killed his wife and I still watch "The Naked Gun."
Haven't read Kerouac in forever, should I?
As literature? No. As a potentially interesting excursion into the literary history of a bygone era? Er, probably not that, either.
Well, for me, for the beats, it was Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg.
Give up on all of those?
Burroughs could write, when he chose to.
Lots of people have poor time management skills.
Like Isaac Newton spent most of his time on alchemy instead of the gravitational laws shtick that is now his legacy.
Isaac Newton lost all his money betting on meme stocks of the day. I don't know what that proves.
Give up on all of those?
Pas du tout/not at all!
Would I personally recommend any or all of these authors? No, I would not. But who am I to tell anyone what he or she should read? If the beats speak to you, of course you should feel free to answer to the black turtle-necked sweater allure of their siren call...
The beats did not speak to me in general. Burroughs probably did at some point, that did not involve a black turtle-necked sweater, maybe that's your perception of it but whatever.
A lot of the music that I listen to, the singers in particular have been heavily influenced by Kerouac. I don't see it, but they do.
Maybe that's a black turtle-necked sweater siren call. That's not how I see it.
If the beats make you tap your feet, might as well enjoy.
I took a college class on the Beats actually. I loved Frank O'Hara and some of Ginsburg. I loathed Keroac. The professor spent like the last third of the course on Bob Dylan, and I was over Dylan and did not consider him the right era anyway.
Except for poems explaining why the hobo with a broken sword you picked up in a pub is really going to be a king, poetry is worthless.
A lot of the music that I listen to, the singers in particular have been heavily influenced by Kerouac.
Can you say more? Or at least give an example? I hadn't realized that Kerouac still exerted an influence on music or poetry, but would be genuinely interested in learning more...
I last read Kerouac when I was a disaffected teenager, rebelling against the narrow and parochial confines of my Irish Catholic upbringing. I wanted to be all edgy and 'intellectual' and shit; but the obvious male supremacy, the easy contempt for women on the part of the beats, just really gave me pause. And then I discovered Jane Austen.
I still read Jane Austen. I no longer read Jack Kerouac.
oh my god heebie no no nooooo o'hara was not a beat!!! 😳😳😳 please please wash your mouth out with soap!!!
i would have to go have a lie down except for i'm already lying down. suppose that was lucky? so alarming.
Hey Jack Kerouac, wasn't that a song?
Don't know if it was Irish Catholic or not.
well that tripped me down an ace rabbit hole of lunch poems, sideways into alice notely with a brief detour for berrigan's elegy for o'hara, and then onward to amy gerstler so thank you heebie even if you did scandalize me. also reminded me fondly of when my kid indisputably reached un certain age bc my stepdaughter & i both gave him lunch poems for christmas. ❤️🍾❤️🍾❤️🍾
Billy, what a saint they've made you...
I haven't read much Kerouac, but am fond of the recording of, "October in the Railroad Earth" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ulUPMyrcXk
Don't know if it was Irish Catholic or not.
Kerouac was a Catholic, of course, because French Canadian. Irish Catholic? Eh, I'm pretty sure not, because if that guy was Irish, I'm a red squirrel, and a loyal member of the local Orange Lodge!...
Here's a thing I vaguely recall reading a few years back that relates a few anecdotes at the intersection of those crowds.
"Burroughs, of course, was no saint. More shocking than his occasional flare-ups of misogyny or his consistent generalized misanthropy are the poisoned arrows he directed at his peers: 'On the credit side of ledger Frank O'Hara was hit and killed by car
Not sure I agree 100% with the policework on what is or is not shocking however ...
Actually, that was an album with a few good songs and I really like Natalie Merchant's voice.
8: However, Phil Ochs most definitely did have a ruptured spleen, asthma, flat feet, an invalid aunt, eyes like a bat, and worked in a defense plant.
oh my god heebie no no nooooo o'hara was not a beat!!!
What was he?
new york school & while there were similar interests e.g. surrealism for some of them including ironically both o'hara & burroughs & obviously a shared cultural moment btwn beats & nys, o'hara was up to something completely different than the beats. there are some lovely recordings of o'hara reading his poems on ebutuoy, go forth & enjoy them. 💓
The contempt for women of that crowd -- you are not kidding. One of Neal Cassady's wives ended up living on the edge of Windsor Great Park and the contrast between her view of beat life and Kerouac's (or Tom Wolfe's) was extraordinary.
screwed up the non-Mailerish link. Try this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/18/beat-poets-cassady-kerouac-ginsberg
Oh fuck. The fuckers left my byline off the little piece I did on CC, thus spoiling the joke about advertisements for myself. But she was a very impressive woman.
Isn't it basically feet of clay all the way down, everywhere you look?
42. I find CC's view a lot less surprising than I would have 50 years ago, when all I knew about Cassady was mediated through Wolfe at one end and the Grateful Dead at the other. And On the Fucking Road. What is so much fun about driving in a straight line from A to B and then doing it all over again? I could never finish OTR because although Kerouac wrote like an angel, the characters and the story were so damn boring I couldn't keep awake. Some of the beats were damn good poets, but I always assumed their personae were entirely invented, except Ferlinghetti who was an honest bookseller.
But if the money they made filtered up to people like Monk, good luck to them.
42: Thought I recognized your style, looked for the byline, and nothing (!) so I'm glad you confirmed.
I had a gig there for six months interviewing people on the edge of the news, or "just not-famous enough to be interesting and possibly human". It was fun, though not as good as writing profiles of worthwhile writers. But the byline, though prominent in the paper [chest swells with pride; testosterone surges uncontrollably; women faint as I walk down the street] seems to have fallen off the individual pieces on the web [sudden chest pains; conviction of permanent impotence; find myself stepping out of the ay of dachshunds on the pavement]
wasn't that a song?
Hey Jack Kerouac
What's it like in New York City?
I'm a thousand miles away
But girl, tonight you look so pretty
50 made me laugh out loud.
So, to update on a question I asked here about a year ago: it turns out gluten-free pie crust is terrible. Someone suggested that since so much of piecrust-making is concerned with halting gluten development (keeping the ingredients supercold, adding the minimum amount of water, handling as little as possible), using gluten-free flour in pie crust might turn out fine. At the time I agreed with this reasoning, but as it turns out, you actually do need your flour particles to stick together enough so that your baked product has some structural integrity. Pre-baking, I knew my dough was in trouble -- it wouldn't hold together at all, and wouldn't roll out in anything close to a single sheet. I finally kind of just pressed it into the pan and baked it. You know how when you par-bake a pie shell, it shrinks, so that it kind of pulls away from the edges of your pie pan? The particles of this dough stuck to each other less well than it did to the pie pan, so instead of shrinking and pulling, it just kind of disintegrated. I pulled it out of the oven and it looked like those photos of dried lake beds, just a million cracks all over. And it didn't have any kind of flaky or even crumbly quality -- as soon as you cut it with a knife, it just shattered to dust.
The pie filling (recipe from Bon Appetit) was very good though.
Maybe my mistake was in thinking that I could use Cup 4 Cup as a literal replacement for regular flour? A lot of the recipes I've seen online call for xanthan gum in addition to what is already in the GF flour.
it turns out gluten-free pie crust is terrible.
Yeah, I hear you. I have tried to do some gluten-free baking, since one of my sisters believes she and her younger son should be following a gluten-free diet (Do they have celiac disease? No. Have they ever even actually been tested for an intolerance to gluten? No again. It's all self-diagnosed, and based on weird sh*t found on the internet, so far as I can tell...). Gluten is actually very important for the structure and texture of baked goods: without gluten, it's like trying to build a brick house without the bricks.
I had some gluten-free baking turn out fine. But maybe the gluten isn't key to chicken nuggets.
I remembered your question and was so curious how it would turn out! The idea of Cup 4 Cup is an exact replacement (same for the King Arthur GF flour), but the final products never quite end up with the right consistency when I use them.
stepdaughter avoids gluten to keep v bad psoriasis in check (works for her, not going to fuss about it) & better half has made v creditable gf pastry, i'll ask for his thoughts & post them.
i find eggs the hardest to substitute in baking for our new default vegan existence. luckily better half's test results have been so great that the fraction of an egg he eats in a slice of cake once a month or so seems fine. my lifelong love of beans & veggies has sure come in handy!
Yeah, eggs would be really hard to do without.
||NMM to Stephen Sondheim. This one hits me hard in the feels. Despite the tradition here, part of me thinks he's someone who wouldn't mind if you kept it up.|>
91 years old. He was supposed to have a new musical out next year.
Sometimes, you're just sitting quietly and other people are singing bits from "Into the Woods."
Mostly covid-wise, everything has been reasonable. SIL and BIL have stayed at their house, everyone else is masked up at Jammies' parents house.
There were two incidents today that lead me to believe that there's some anger simmering:
- my BIL is no longer having symptoms and said that it's been 10 days since exposure, so would everyone be okay with him coming over to see kids? We said no, it's only been five days since you started having symptoms - seems too short - but maybe we could all hang out together outside? he did not reply.
- Just now, SIL was face-timing with her eldest, who has absorbed the most of their rightwingness. He was wearing his mask. She told him he didn't have to. He rolled his eyes and said, "Everyone here thinks I'm going to get Covid." She said, "You don't have covid. Take it off." So he took it off. Pretty much everyone was within earshot for that conversation, so it set the eldest up for a confrontation with everyone. It seemed somewhat tense and a terrible spot to put the kid in.
Granted, we're just at five days now, so he probably is negative. They've been testing each morning. But it puts everyone in an awkward position to have it go down like that.
The thing is, the BIL and SIL are correct that probably none of us would get particularly sick. The actual problem is that none of us want to cancel all our plans for ten days, and we would feel morally bound too. The BIL and SIL just wouldn't cancel their plans for ten days and would think that's an overreaction. That's where the tension lies. I'm not sure whether they would have kept their kids home from school.
(And in fact, they flew the day after exposure, vacationed with his family, and flew back, despite that he may have been starting to feel off by the 2nd flight.)
||
lourdes, if you're around, my niece is wondering if you'd be willing to be interviewed for her undergrad sociology project about how lockdown has affected trans & non-binary folks' relationship with gender. I mentioned what you'd said about the comfort/complacency provided by mask-wearing and she was interested in hearing more. Of course, please feel entirely free to decline being intruded upon by the relative of an internet stranger. I'm at mypseud at geemail if you'd rather say yes/no there.
|>
I guess I don't know what the rules are now at school in terms of how long you need to stay away if a close contact of a case.
My father announced to a tableful of strangers and near-strangers that my job is "murdering animals." (I think he thought this was funny, but he is also super deadpan so even the unserious nature might have been lost on everyone. Also, I don't think it's funny.) He then told me later when I texted him requesting he never do that again he didn't realize it was a "sensitive topic" and that he "was sorry I was offended." So, that was interesting, having to explain my (somewhat esoteric and technical) job to strangers with that lead-in.
We keep getting emails from the school about cases in other peoples's kids. It's like the lice emails, but more serious so I don't make bets on which kid.
(Commiserating with heebie's in-law fuckery.)
I get that it's a sensitive topic, but my favorite thing about the scientists who use animals for subjects is that they "sacrifice" them. I have trouble refraining from laughing at conferences when the presenter says "the first fifteen rabbits were sacrificed at 10 weeks" because I'm picturing something like Temple of Doom or the top of a Mayan pyramid.
Honestly, I'm probably not the best conference attendee regardless.
68: Yeah, a lot of folks don't like that terminology, and AFAICT it's on its way out in favor of "euthanized." I had basically the same thought the first time I heard it, too.
I'm not happy with the change, but the odds are pretty small I'll ever be at a conference where that type of research is presented again.
What's wrong with just saying killed? Isn't that the simplest, most factual and value-neutral way of referring to it? Sacrificed sounds ridiculous, and euthanized sounds argumentative (as does murdered, obviously).
72: Killed doesn't imply you're following relevant rules and regs. Euthanized implies things like pain relief. Sacrificed was used for quite a long time to imply that the lived were being sacrificed to further medical knowledge, to acknowledge there was a loss and to try to emphasize a greater moral good (think about this what you like, this was the impetus for the terminology).
Sorry, ydnew, that's exactly the sort of dumbshit thing I would say. Too bad he couldn't find the high road when you invited to.
Heebie, it's so awful.
57: oh man, me too. I was only a theater kid for about 5 minutes in the grand scheme of things, but I was also one of the most ardent 12-year-old fans of "Sunday in the Park with George" in, probably, my entire state.
63: [passed along -- we're running around Tucson with all kinds of craziness rn but assuming next week is okay, there's a good chance she'll be game.]
55. They say you can use the liquid from a can of chickpeas vel sim as a substitute for eggs in baking. I'm waiting for someone else to try it first.
I'm making banana bread now. It's vegetarian, but not vegan.
Nobody will eat my non-vegetarian banana bread.
Apparently, the texture of the brisket it too different.
77: i've played around with it in savory things & where the eggs are doing emulsion work (principally mayonnaise & such). for e.g. quick breads & similar cakes, ground flax seeds gelled in water works okay. the king arthur sute us v helpful & informative. its egg foam cakes that are the challenge, i'm not sold on chickpea water for both taste & functional reasons. ultimately end up figuring general restraint should allow for occasional indulgence.
I've never taken a hand mixer to a bowl of chickpea water, but if I ever do, it will not be in a spirit of optimism.
it's interesting but in the end i'm more likely to just make something vegan that isn't trying to be fake non-vegan. also - missing my beloved better half but also en profitant de son absence by slinging around cream butter eggs like anything, fattening up the kid (in my dreams!), and currently sitting in the lovely sf sun with brisket, coleslaw, a relatively well mannered ipa and latest lrb - all is pretty good. & just sent him a loooong list of books to bring back from the fr section at foyle's & instructions re duty free perfumes! lol
I've been lacto-ovo vegetarian for many years, but just can't seem to take the next step to veganism. Mostly because I love to bake, I suspect.
Do I think I "need" eggs/milk/cheese/butter/cream? No, I do not (though I seriously love a good cheddar, it has to be said...).. But can I even imagine baking without butter and eggs? No, I cannot.
Basically, 83.1 is where I fall with recipe substitutions, but I do end up sometimes cooking for folks who can't have a particular ingredient and ask me if I can make something that tastes close. (One Christmas, I spent hours with AJ's sister testing out vegan caramels.)
Dq, have you tried anything from Isa Chandra Moskowitz? She wrote a cookbook about vegan cupcakes, and the ones I tried were fine. Mostly, she seems to target a consistency of box cake, but if I remember correctly, the recipes are nearly all vinegar and baking soda for leavening, so you might be able to build on the basic ratios if you wanted to invest hours in experimentation.
There's someone here that makes caramels from goat milk. They also make goat milk cheese. I think they just like goats and got tired of questions.
I've sent them to people, but I still eat Swedish Fish and cheddar.
Obviously, it's also protection of assets after Biden brings in the communism because you can't nationalize goats.
I bet goat milk caramels are nice.
A few years ago, we went to a wedding of a friend whose now-husband's family is from Kenya. The groom's family was responsible for procuring enough goats to feed guests at the reception. The bride wanted a small backyard ceremony in the US and a bigger one later in her home country. The groom's family kept inviting more and more people until, she told me in exasperation, the reception had swelled to a size that would require three goats to feed the guests.
AJ and I now refer to something that has spiraled out of control in similar fashion a "three-goat wedding." The goat curry was delicious, for what it's worth.
I don't recall eating goat before, but I probably have. Someone new in town asked me where to buy goat and I knew the answer because there's only one halal butcher I ever heard of.
85.2: i haven't checked her out - at this point everyday baking is mostly to provide extra calories to the kid, so it's full on butter, eggs, etc.
i adore "three goat wedding" as an expression it is so marvelous.
84.2: i've concluded really good cheese is something i would regret not having had, on my future death bed. also fried eggs. so i still eat those & the better half is wonderfully sanguine about it.
Lately I've seen people try to class up the chickpea water by calling it "aquafaba," which is truly the silliest.
63: Hi! We're in a motel in Bakersfield, just drove past a blinky wind farm, will write when home.
I've switched on an egg beater in a bowl of chickpea water, but only to get the gunk off the blades.
Have now an extremely successful recipe for Lussekatter -- Saffron buns for St Lucia's day -- and the cat stretches out in front of the fire as if inviting me to roll his ends up into a lussekatt shape. The recipe says to knead for ten minutes at least, but an hour in the breadmaker works even better.
92.2 could have been phrased as county music lyrics.
94 Bakersfield blinks wind farm man
As I sat at the Doubletree, blinking lights above me.....
The rest writes itself.
98 coincidentally I am at one of the Doubletree hotels in Arrakis. Are you spying on me, Moby?
94: An underappreciated musical sub-genre whose greatest hits include Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman" and Kenny Rogers' "Coward of the County."
We spent Thanksgiving Eve at a Courtyard by Marriott hotel outside of Disney World, and the suite I shelled out for (celebrating Mr. Robot's birthday) was just terrible. I had already cracked the glass on my phone that morning and endured my grandmother's non-stop complaining about our family for the previous 24-hours, so I was totally over everything by that point. Thanksgiving Day at Disney's Hollywood Studios turned out to be pretty great, though.
Now, of course, I have a sore throat, stuffed-up sinuses, and stomach issues. Negative antigen home test for Covid this morning, and I received the booster three weeks ago, so I assume my immune system is just reacting to being around germy people. I'm debating whether it's responsible to teach in-person tomorrow.
In other words, I'm feeling super crabby, but great fun to have this spot for my own complaining.
As part of my quixotic effort to reduce my anxiety without necessarily being drunk, I'm giving up the Herman Cain Awards and related for Advent.