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Can we talk about poetry for a spell?  Now, poetry really is not my forté, either from a reading or a writing point of view.  It’s that whole aspect of “what is the author trying to say here?” which brings back terrifying shades of high school English class.  Very clever people can read Poe and understand him, or read Wordsworth and not fall asleep.  I am not one of these people.  My own taste in poetry is, I would imagine, fairly generic.  My favourite poem in the whole wide world is The Female of the Species by Rudyard Kipling, followed closely by The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) by ee cummings, Tu Dis Que Tu Aimes Les Oiseaux by Jacques Prévert, The Pig by Roald Dahl (I never said my poetry choices were high-brow), Pablo Neruda’s Sonnets (library or Amazon, like NOW), and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot.

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From the standpoint of writing poetry, however…  I was talking to a friend recently and the topic of poetry came up briefly.  He was of the opinion that I should continue to write poetry, which got me thinking.  Amateur poetry, so far as I am concerned, is kind of like watching Keanu Reeves act.  It’s so boring, and painful, and embarrassing that you want to kill the people around you just to put them out of their misery.  And I don’t even understand the rules of poetry.  What is a rhyming couplet?  I mean, obviously it means that there are two of something and that they rhyme, but where do they go?  First line, last line?  Middle lines?  I still don’t know what “iambic pentameter” is.  I’ve asked lots of people, but no one has satisfactorily answered the question.  Anyone?  Anyone?  I think it takes real talent to write good poetry that both flows beautifully and presents an image to which the reader can relate.  Good poetry, truly excellent poetry, is almost transcendental.  It provokes thought and feeling with very few words.  That, my friends, is hard.

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At the end of the day, in spite of my hissing and spitting, I continue to write poetry.  Unlike my fiction, which I will sometimes show to (a select group of) people, no one sees my poetry, because it’s very personal.  It’s like a journal entry.  A snapshot of emotion taken in a split-second of time.  I would not normally have considered sharing this with you, because, you know…  However, at some point, I have to stop clinging to the rocks and just jump.  You may not like it.  You may have your own miniature Keanu Reeves episode, and that’s OK.  I’m happy with what I’ve written.  It will never live up to the likes of Shakespeare, or Frost, or Kipling, but I never intended it to do so.  And now that I have suitably lowered your expectations, I present some of my own poetry for your (dubious) reading pleasure.

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Comfort

Soft.

The shadows lengthen.

Bright,

As moonlight falls.

There in the darkness,

Solitude.

The watches of Midnight

Approach.

Beneath the arc of stars,

Happiness.

In the stillness of night,

Suspension.

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Whither Thou Goest

Love

Is not a moment.

It is not romance, nor the caress of skin.

It is not darkness, nor impending gloom.

It is true joy.

Laughter.

Acceptance.

I do not know

What pathway you walk,

For you walk it without me.

With my blessing, without me.

I watch

For the future.

I see nothing but ghosts.

Leave me not to my vices, to the pull of regret.

Leave me not with the memories of loss,

And a heart full of fear.

Love

Is not afraid.

It not deceitful, nor angry.

It is not bitter, nor resentful.

It is loyalty.

Compassion.

Understanding.

Love

Is bright fire

To light the darkest of nights

And the scariest of hollows.

There are no ghosts.

And no regrets.

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Now, I’ll be the first person to admit that my taste in movies is fairly low-brow.  If something blows up and people are shooting at each other with no discernible back-story, then I’m there.  Bruckheimer is a movie god, even if his plots have holes through which you could fly a squadron of F22 Raptors.  He excels at car chases, explosions,and gun fights, and no one does awkward and uncomfortable emotion better than Bruckheimer.  He even does sword fights!

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But this blog post is not to extol the virtues of the Great Bruckheimer, but to throw sharp and pointy objects at the detestable Donnie Darko.  For those of you not familiar with this ridiculous, angst-driven snooze fest, it stars a young Jake Gyllenhall as a teenager with some paranoid schizophrenic tendencies.  Having a near-death experience at the beginning of the move, Donnie starts seeing a scary bunny named Frank who tells him to do terrible things.

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Meet Frank

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Now, this in itself isn’t so weird.  (I mean, it is, but it isn’t any more weird than any other angsty movie you’re likely to come across).  It’s when you start to actually watch the movie that makes no sense.  There are flashbacks and some ongoing notion about time-travel which makes even less sense than the popularity of Britney Spears.  Time travel?  Is there a Delorean?  A Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Terminator?  No?  Then I don’t care.

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I am reminded continually of my high school English classes when you had to dissect books and discern what the author was trying to tell the masses.  Apparently the director was trying to tell us things.  Look, I don’t want the director trying to tell me anything.  It’s an effing movie.  Who cares what it all means?

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In spite of my taste in movies, I consider myself pretty smart.  My friend Eli is one of the smartest people I know.  And after we got done watching the damn movie, neither of us were able to figure out exactly what had happened or what the stupid thing was all about.  Eli hit up Google to find some kind of explanation for what we had just wasted 2 whole hours watching and we found the director’s “interpretation”.  I don’t know about you, but I hear that and I want to run far, far away.  Any movie that needs an explanation about the director’s vision, quite frankly, is so pretentious that it makes me want to throw things.  Eli read the “interpretation” out loud.  It was peppered liberally with such phrases as primary universe, tangent universe, manipulated dead, living receiver, and fourth dimensional construct.

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I think that’s quite enough of that, thank you.

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I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think it’s a brilliant movie.  More power to you.  I assume you work at MIT lecturing on astrophysics or else you’re currently building a Transporter à la Star Trek in your basement.  I must also assume that you are the reason that Richard Kelly made a sequel.  Entitled S. Darko, the sequel tells the story of Donnie Darko’s younger sister, Samantha.  No doubt it is more of the same angst-ridden, boring, confusing, self-serving, pretentious nonsense.  Damn you, Richard Kelly and your so-called artistic visions.

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Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear the mindless delight of Transformers calling my name.

While I am certainly not going to start singing David Bowie’s Changes, I should probably point out that it’s what I have on my mind.  But that’s me all over.  (As an interesting aside, I had the hugest crush on David Bowie when he did Labyrinth.  Clearly I have issues.)

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*sigh*

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Getting back to the subject at hand, I have reached a point where I feel like I need to be honest with you, because I’m sure that you’ve noticed I’m not posting much of anything these days.  Or, you know, anything at all.  Food and cooking makes me happy.  However, the necessity of getting a recipe perfect, taking pictures, running them through the devil-spawn known as Photoshop, and then writing a blog post to go along with it has diminished a lot of the joy I get from my time in the kitchen.  I don’t like the feeling of resentment I get every time I decide to cook something.  It makes me sad.

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In the last few months, I have started work in earnest on my first novel.  I have been writing fiction since I was in high school, however, it’s never been anything other than a hobby I take more seriously than I probably should.  This book, the vampire masterpiece I have been longing to write since 11th grade, is the first novel I have ever written with the knowledge that I will someday submit it for publication.  This blog, formerly a journal in food form, will chronicle the journey from laptop to (hopefully) bookstore.

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I understand that I may lose some followers by deciding to do this.  I don’t blame you for that- you’re here for the food!  I thank you for your support while this was all about the eating.  I do hope that some of you will continue to check back for some truly acerbic wit and lots of book info.

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I just want to take a quick minute to thank everyone who has taken the time to visit and read, but there are a handful of people (not related to me) who continued to come back and post comments regularly.  I would like to thank Jessie Cross of The Hungry Mouse, The Daily Spud, Jenni Field from The Online Pastry Chef, and, of course, my Kate from One Tree Past the Fence.  Thank you so much for the support in the early days.  I do hope that you continue to stop by from time to time.

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Oh, and David Bowie totally rocks.

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Let’s Dance…

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The Nice market

When my parents announced that they were buying an apartment in the south of France, I was a little perplexed.  Although we had been to France a few times when I was younger, it wasn’t a place that we had spent any massive amount of time.  My parents don’t speak French.  And we’re English.  We’ve had a nice steady animosity towards the French since the Normans invaded.  Why on earth stop now?  But my father thought it would be nice to bedevil the Franch from the inside, so they bought a modest 2-bedroom apartment in a place called Juan-les-Pins, about 30 minutes from Nice and spitting distance from Cannes.

The Nice Shoreline

The south of France is glorious during the early summer.  It’s not overrun with tourists and it isn’t too hot- that comes later in the summer.  Our days unfolded as follows.

1. My father would hold out for as long as possible before finally deciding that he was bored.  Then he dragged the rest of us out of bed.
2. We would head into one of the local towns (Nice, Antibes, Cannes) to mooch around the market (so I could take pictures like a brainless tourist) and the local shops (so my mother could touch things).
3. A coffee at one of the local cafes.  I hate coffee, so I would drink Diet Coke or hot chocolate.  I had a slice of lemon tart one day.
4. More wandering around the market (tasting olives, buying cheese, marvelling at the fresh produce) and watching my dad and my sister attempting to karate chop each other.
5. Lunch.
6. More sightseeing/shopping/karate before heading home.
7. The afternoon was usually spent reading, but sometimes my sister and I would head out sans parents to terrorise the village of Juan les Pins.  If we didn’t, then I would take a walk at some point to buy baguettes (which seemed to vanish the second I set foot in the house) and tomatoes.
8. Dinner.
9. Once the sun had gone down and it was safe for me to emerge from my coffin, I would join my parents on the terrace and sit doing family things until it was time for bed.
10. Rinse and repeat.

The markets in France are just superb.  Even the one in Antibes, which was fairly small, was filled to bursting with at least 2 cheesemongers, several vendors selling olives, a man selling nothing but honey and honey products, a charcutier selling cured meat and sausage, and seemingly miles of fresh produce.

A small selection of olives at the Antibes market

However, it was nothing compared to the market at Nice.  Whatever you can imagine, the market at Nice will have it.  Salts, herbs, spices, flowers, candy, dried tomatoes, mushrooms…  If it was in season, then it was at the market.

The section of the market which I found most fascinating were the vendors selling tray after tray of candied fruit and flowers.  While one would expect to see the usual suspects, such as ginger, citrus, and pineapple, they were also selling items such as dried kiwi, candied strawberries, and crystallised flower petals (usually rose and violet, but also leaves of vervaine and mint).  We tried tiny candied fraises des bois (wild strawberries) which were just amazing.

As brilliant as the markets were, there was one thing France had that we also have in abundance- pigeons.  However, they seemed to take to the French way of life.  Most of the pigeons I saw were too busy sunbathing to beg for food.

Working on the tan…

An afternoon snack in the South of France

I am blessed with parents who try to be supportive no matter what crackpot idea I happen to have up my sleeve at the time.  So, when it came time for my annual return to the motherland, it was my father who suggested that we spend a week in France so that I could get some “material” for the blog.  Of course, I immediately dusted off my best French, “Le singe est sur la branch,” and packed sweaters and boots for an English summer.  Boy, did I need them.  Of course, leather-soled cowboy boots are less helpful in a damp country than you might immediately think.  If it happens to be raining (and it’s England- it rains all the time) chances are high that you’ll break your neck.

But I digress…

Over the next couple of weeks you can expect to find blog posts detailing my time in both France and England, lots of pictures, and many recipes.  I feel comfortable saying (since she’s several thousand miles away) that plane travel with my mother is the most stressful thing you can do that doesn’t cause bleeding.  French waiters are really quite delightful (I’ll reserve judgment on totally delightful until I return to Paris).  I found that I can live, quite happily, on bread and tomatoes.  And there is nothing like a French supermarket.  As for England, it is the most comforting place in the world.  Cold, damp, green, familiar, and quite simply beautiful.