A is for Artichoke

Sally Rightor Parks’s A is for Artichoke (Pasadena: Water Works, 2014) is a book of fifty-two paintings, two for each letter of the alphabet, one painting showing the letter in its upper- and lower-case forms, the other depicting a flower or fruit or vegetable whose name begins with that letter. A border of leaves or flowers (good for counting!) runs around each page. (One exception: for the mushroom, it’s caps and slices.) The paintings are rustic watercolors: delicately curled beet leaves, a luminous eggplant with its floppy hat, a forest of fennel, a brightly spotted zucchini. A quiet, witty touch: the red, white, and green of the pages for the jalapeño.

A is for Artichoke is a large and sturdy, 10″ x 12½″, perfect for use with a child or grandchild in one’s lap. The book is available from Vroman’s Bookstore in sunny Pasadena. And boy, is that bookstore fast.

Q: Can you guess what edible goes with the letter h ?

Sardine moose

[Field & Stream, November 1976. Click for a larger view.]

I could do without the hunting. But I like the idea of carrying around four or five cans of sardines. Is that For Hunters Only?

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End of the U.S. sardine industry
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Teenagers with moose

[The lunch hour approaches.]

If Homer’s poems were television channels

Iliad: History.

Odyssey: Food Network.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)
Football : baseball :: Iliad : Odyssey

[Yes, The History Channel is now History.]

Zippy at the Summit Diner

[Zippy, March 13, 2015.]

I am thrilled to see Zippy visiting the Summit Diner in Somerset, Pennsylvania. In years past, our family stopped for dinner there many times when schlepping eastward on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Now, no Turnpike, no diner.

The Summit Diner had — and perhaps still has — postcards. It also had jukeboxes. And a phone booth outside.


[Click for a larger view.]

On the other side of the postcard:

The Summit Diner, located at 791 N. Center Ave., Somerset, PA, 15501, just off Pennsylvania Turnpike Exit 10. Phone 814–445–7154. Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The Summit now closes at 10:00 p.m.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, March 13, 2013.]

Those socks. Those feet. Or are they cloven hooves?

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams

Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams:

“He was always telling us, ‘Go to the library.’ Practicing every day wasn’t enough; he wanted us to be serious. ‘Go get books — you don’t need a lot of money,’ he told us. He’d already taught himself orchestration and how to play clarinet; he had studied all the piano players. And yet he still has the child-like attitude toward things — he was full of wonder. Around the piano, even today, you get the sense that he’s still a kid.”

Quoted in the liner notes for the ECM disc Made in Chicago, the recording of an August 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival concert by DeJohnette’s Special Legends Edition Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill. I wrote about the concert in 2013. The recording was released this week, and it’s a killer.

Here, from ECM, is a short film about Made in Chicago.

[“Still a kid”: In August 2013, Muhal Richard Abrams was almost eighty-three.]

Another Cento

Here is another Cento, one that’s usually in our cabinet of canned goods. I use Cento Tomato Puree when I make sauce — so easy to do, and the result is better than anything that comes from a jar. I have it on good authority that only the finest lines from the poets of il dolce stil novo — Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, Dante — go into Cento Tomato Puree.

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Word of the day: cento

[Image borrowed from Cento Fine Foods.]

Word of the day: cento

A.Word.A.Day’s Word of the Day is cento:

noun : A literary work, especially a poem, composed of parts taken from works of other authors.

The cento is dear to readers of modern and postmodern poetry. From a page I gave my students earlier this fall, as we skipped lightly through T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

One way to enter into the spirit of Eliot’s mosaic-like poem is to make a cento, a poem made of lines from other poems. (Cento—pronounced “sen-toh”—comes from the Latin word for “patchwork.”) Making a cento is not a matter of plagiarism: the sources are meant to be recognized as such. A cento is not the way to make a reputation as a poet; it’s more a matter of game a poet might play, ranging among the works of ancestors and bringing unexpected tones and textures into a poem: “Come, Shepherd, and again renew the quest.” (!)

The preëminent cento-maker of our time is John Ashbery. Here are three of his centos: “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” “They Knew What They Wanted,” and “To a Waterfowl.” The line above, from Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy,” turns up in the first of these centos.

[Yes, centos: “Originally with Latin plural centones ; afterwards centoes , now usually centos  the French and Italian forms of the singular have also been used” (Oxford English Dictionary ).]

Telephone booths

[“Busy telephone booths during an airline strike.” Photograph by Robert W. Kelley. Chicago, 1961. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Notice the Western Union sign too.

See also Diane Schirf’s meditation on phone booths.

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And then there were four Outdoor phone booths
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The Lonely Phone Booth
Wooden phone booths

Another Mark Trail improvement

[Mark Trail revised, March 10, 2015.]

Now with needless words really, really omitted.

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How to improve writing (no. 55) Today’s strip, improved