WhimsyLand

I am so hopelessly middlebrow, a term I found used frequently in a 55 year-old Poetry review, so I guess it's an affliction with some provenance.  I ran out of things to read, as my scheme of turning United frequent flier miles into magazines went awry somewhere last month.  This propelled me to the local Borders on Sunday, because the much less expensive used book store on Main Street was closed, just like the pawn shop, the framing store, and the Ares Thrift Store that surround it (the Pump House Brew Pub was open, however).  Longmont Main Street looks like Boulder's Pearl Street did 25 years ago, and probably a lot like Main Street in your town, if your town is somewhere in Iowa.  There are no-name coffee spots attempting to be Starbucks, bagel stores that double as Mexican bakeries, auto parts outlets, a Duncan's Donuts, a combination coin and jewelry store, at least 3 music stores that vie with the pawn shops for the mid-range guitar accessory consumer, a place that promises You Can Sing, a place that sells nothing but vacuum cleaners.  I'm sure that in 20 years, the block will be littered with Il Fornaio restaurants and Banana Republics. 

Anyway, all I was looking for at the used book store was more Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries, which I figured at 15-20 years old, would be selling for half of their original cover price.  Alas, I was transported to the nicer side of Longmont, then sucked into the Chain Bookstore vortex, navigating by the latest best-sellers at the main table, variously adorned by dragons, blood-dripped scalpels, and Famous People On Television.  I did find a new Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child, which I snapped up in a heartbeat, as I love the idea of a Englishman writing terrific escapist stories about an ex-Military Police drifter.  There was a Walter Mosley Easy Rawlins mystery in the discount tray that I hadn't read and, yes, I did find a couple of Brother Cadfael books under $7 each.  The poetry section, which Junie and I have scanned assiduously since the store opened, seemed to have settled down to Mostly The Same Famous Poets.  This included blasts from the past (Rimbaud, Neruda, Frost, Eliot (3 copies of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, no wastelands),Poe, Dickinson, oh you know), the Accessible Big Names (Hirshfield, Collins, Giovanni, Angelou), lots of anthologies (including an interesting one that included pictures and poems, poets whom I had only barely heard of, poets whom everyone has heard of, and Carl Phillips, whose inclusion almost got me to buy the thing), and a very strange assortment of poetry books that resided on the shelves only, I think, because of daring on the part of the Poetry Department Buyer and lack of interest on the part of the Longmont clientele.  For example, there was no work by Mary Jo Bang (which I would have snapped up just to make them refill the hole with more of the dear lady), but there were two copies of The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by August Kleinzahler, that curmudgeonly soul who was recently trying to drill a new orifice for Garrison Keillor.  There were three or four books by Galway Kinnell, which I thought showed a lot of class, an equal number of Komunyakaa,  and the expected scattering of Pinsky, Hass, and Heaney (though, curiously no Walcott, as long as we're mentioning Nobel Laureates).  I ended up buying another Ann Carson book.  There was a book of essays filled with the original Greek that I avoided, as well as Autobiography of Red, which I had read — in fact, I think I read it aloud to Junie on our first trip to Bayfield, but I digress.  Honestly, there was a time when I could stand in front of Ms. Zaller's class and sight-translate "Omnia Gaulia es divisa en tres partes", but those days are long gone and Greek isn't anything like that, more like the street signs when I lived in Teheran.  In any event,  I bought the erudite Ms. Carson's Plainwater, which is a delightful collection of poetry and essays that doesn't seem to be on Amazon, when you prime the search pump with the appropriate Carsonesque effluvia.  I'm only a little bit through it, so you'll have to wait for a take, and besides, Junie wants to weigh in, too.  I was also looking for a non-fiction book about the Real Historical Jesus by a guy I'd heard chatting on All Things Considered, but Junie swears that I already own the book and even discussed it with her, so I'll wait until she shows up tomorrow and we can go hunting through the many bookshelves until we find it tucked away somewhere.

Today, I received another Dean and De Luca catalog and a recent issue of Poetry.  Well, actually Peotry, as it's the humor issue and they decided to take some license, and why not when you have eight figures to throw around.  More on that when I get to it, and I'll probably get a few chuckles out of it and, yet again, be thrown out of the Official Avant Garde Crowd.  Dean and De Luca is the usual decadence-on-glossy, with a cover page strewn with the steamed results of a clam bake.  Inside this issue you are given the opportunity to buy the Traditional Clambake© for $120, which includes lobsters, clams, potatoes, corn and seaweed, but not the Seafood Steamer©, which will set you back another $60.  If it's just lobster you crave, there's always the 2-pound tub of lobster salad and 8 old-fashioned rolls for $130.  Just like last time, there are various combinations of wild and fresh salmon varieties, at prices that would make you think you paid to give birth to them.  Soft-shell crabs, like the ones that I had on sandwiches for $1.50 when I went to Johns Hopkins, come to you straight from the Chesapeake, $90 for a dozen.  Meat never goes out of style, unless you're on Junie's diet, which seems to involve a lot of walnuts and berries, and D&D has all you'd want:  Leg of lamb, $70;  four prime Porterhouses, $200.  God forbid you should just wander over to Chipotle's.  Get a half-dozen Carnitas Turnovers for $48 or 48 Southwestern Hors D'oeuvres for $55 (Portobello Mushroom and Herb Empeñadas, Chile con Queso Tortilla Trumpets, et cetera).  $250 Japanese knives, $145 racks of herb tubes, dozens of Extra Virgin Oil bottles that cost more than a good Bordeaux, a complete set of household tools molded from dark chocolate.   The funniest entry was the burlap bag of Virginia peanuts, roasted in the shell, humble at only $28.  I love this magazine, if only for the imagining of who buys this stuff.

OK, gotta get some work done.  My client who makes the World's Only Self-Playing Audiobook needs the next release to work without the glitches that currently inhabit, like those gremlins in the WWII Bugs Bunny cartoon, the software that I've so far delivered.  And, of course, I have to give the Peotry a good reading.

See you in a bit.