This Week's Cocktail

Because I've been craving it, and haven't been getting it: Sangria.

Red or white? Use wine (usually red, sometimes white), fresh fruit, two tablespoons of sugar, and brandy, whiskey, or (more rarely) rum (one shot to the bottle of wine). Combine and chill over night. Before serving add some type of clear citric beverage (sprite, 7-up), gingerale, or club soda (2 cups).

If you want to serve it immediately, use lots of ice. This is a drink that needs to be cold. Now if only it would stop raining, I could make some.

Image from here where they have lots of different recipes for sangria.

Books You Should Be Reading But Aren't: Trilogy

Yes, HD. So hard to find in a bookstore, so enjoyable to read. For those of you who do not know, HD stands for Hilda Doolittle, who was brought to us by Ezra Pound (Imagiste!). As one of the few female Imagist poets, she stands out. Her brief lyricism is decidedly more feminine than the lines of her male contemporaries (i.e. Eliot, Pound). It was mostly her earlier work that garnered the Imagist label (it's said that the label was invented by Pound to market her work), and by the thirties and forties she had moved on to work that is rarely specifically defined, but is broadly modernist. At the penning of Trilogy (in England during the second World War) she worked with varying mythologies and history to write effective war poetry which has the ability to be violent but is softened by romantic phrasing.


The tenth poem of the first section of trilogy, "The Walls Do Not Fall"

But we fight for life,
we fight, they say, for breath,

so what good are your scribblings?
this--we take them with us

beyond death: Mercury, Hermes, Thoth
invented the script, letters, palette;

they indicated flute or lyre-notes
on papyrus or parchment

are magic indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,

forever; remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter born

your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over

in the beginning
was the Word.

HD's poetic signature in Trilogy was her couplet (though not a heroic or rhymed couplet, perhaps extending from the Imagistic idea that "the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms...a new cadence means a new idea." (Some Imagist Poets, 1916)). Her later work was influenced by DH Lawrence, so the motives became more grandiose and less pointed, often making the work more difficult (and less read). Trilogy is a journey that is not linear, but rather jumps back and forth through times and cultures to make large statements about war, the written word, and our place in all of these things.

For more information on Imagism and their tenets, go here (a really good read by Amy Lowell), and for more information about HD's sordid, Freud-filled life, go here.

Fuck Ups: Trophies

When my friend, X, went to Boston, she was expecting a bold, run-around weekend with an old friend, wherin they would put on some mascara, drink a lot, and see all the sights. What X found, however, was that her sharp friend had gone all pink around the edges-- sorority pink. X's friend lived in a sorority suite in her college dorm. The walls were plastered with snapshots of hungry co-eds posing in diners where Harvard MBA men (their future husbands) are known to hang out

After being loaned an expired ID from a sorority alumna, X allowed herself to be squeezed into something sequined and taken out to wait in the rain for an hour outside a"really fantastic club". This club turned out to be a glorified sports bar where Boston's lesser college girls go to make themselves available to disinterested baseball fanatics. X's friend was set on picking up a guy to show X just exactly how smooth and confident she had become since beginning her BA. She made a big show for her sisters about what a slut she was (even though X knew very well that she was a virgin with huge self-confidence issues), then started to sucker men into buying her shots of raspberry vodka. X, tired of her (soon to be ex-) friend's sad show-boating, decided the best thing would be to never have to return to the Greek girls' rookery again.

X adjusted her size 12 jeans and set across the bar to make time with a reasonably cute Red Sox fan. He was wearing a baseball cap, nursing a beer, and trying to avoid the ladies in Juicy Couture. X introduced herself, paid for her own beer, and made a joke about her tattoo (a camel on her toe... Get it?). After listening to the guy talk about baseball for at least fifteen minutes, X made her move. She said, "You're hat is really sexy" (or something to that effect), and the guy went all squiggly around the edges. X had politely seduced the man into getting her the hell out of dodge.

Back at his place, things moved along nicely. While riding him reverse cowgirl, however, X realized that she wasn't going to have an orgasm. "Fuck this," she thought, and dismounted without warning. Before the confused Bostonian could react, X had gathered her clothes, snagged his Red Sox hat from its proud peg on the wall, and aborted Mission Avoid Sorority Life.

She wore that ball cap all the way home. It almost made up for the fact that she'd lost her cellphone at the guy's apartment. A good rule of thumb from my good friend, X, "If I'm not going to have an orgasm, why should he? Especially if I don't even know his last name."

One Wet Sentence

The other day while enjoying sushi with a dear friend and Samuel Fuckett staff writer, she mentioned that she and another friend had been perusing the singles pages on craigslist. She described to me how half of the ads they read contained one lewd sentence and then at the bottom: "If that got you wet, send me an email."

My friend was upset. "How is one sentence going to get me wet? I need more than that!"

I thought for a second, and agreed. When it comes to a craigslist ad I need more than one sentence to get me wet. Things like "want 2 suck ur dick" might be intriuging, but certainly not pant ruining. When I thought about it more, I then realized that there was a single sentence that could get me wet. It isn't particularily lewd, but if I were to stumble upon a craigslist ad that read:

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The Dead by James Joyce"

I would email that person right away to tell them that their ad required me to mop my chair.

So, dear readership (if you are out there), what one sentence, literary or pornographic (or both), gets you wet?

Last Night--An Open Thread

Went to dinner, had white rice and whiskey. Went to a bar and discussed the white appropriation of jazz music with a John Mayer loving black man. Got tired of hearing Michael Jackson music.



What did you do last night? Tell us in the comments.