Sunday, November 30, 2008

Quick vegan cooking

By Tracy

Here's tonight's vegan apple pie, sweetened with sultanas and little flecks of dried apricot, and eagerly sampled by Tim just before he went to bed.:


















And below is the last remaining piece of the vegan lasagne we had for dinner:



Tim was excited because for once he ate exactly the same as us (rather than a simplified, bland child's version based on the same ingredients!). He adores lasagne and in fact all the Italian-style vegan dishes he knows.

Disclaimers:
I wouldn't usually make a lasagne and a pastry dessert in one evening, but the lasagne was very light (just tomato and mushroom filling, with a vegan bechamel sauce which is made using nutritional yeast, one of my favourite ingredients).

I'm no food photographer, but at least it gives some idea...

For those wanting more detail and more regular postings on vegan food and recipes, there are some blogs dedicated to this, e.g. Notes from the Vegan Feast Kitchen, or The Vegan Lunchbox, and doubtlessly many others.

Mostly I don't use recipe books -- I'm a very informal cook. But some of our staples have come from books like How It All Vegan and The Vegan Cookbook.

Every recipe I have tried from How It All Vegan actually works -- this is not always the case with cookbooks!

And the second book, a UK title by Wakeman and Baskerville, is a kind of standard that tells you how to make everything basic (including vegan cream, vegan custard, vegan yoghurt etc -- parts of it are almost a Golden Wattle for vegans). It doesn't have any pictures other than on the cover, but it's very practical and my copy is much stained, especially from making a vegan chocolate-cream tart which I based on their chocolate custard, and will have to photograph next time I make it...

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Seven useful things I need to learn to do

By Tracy

In no particular order:

1. Sewing. I was hopeless at this at school, and have resisted returning to it in any way at all since then. I tell myself it's the spatial aspect I can't handle ("I'll end up stitching the wrong bits together") but I've never had that problem when making up knitted garments, so it's just self-deluding. Plus, I was hopeless at cooking in my schooldays, and have no problems with it now... so the schooldays excuse doesn't wash. Why this resistance to such a useful skill?

2. Preserving fruits and vegetables. I used to make a lot of jam (easy) but I have never learned how to bottle or to dry. Resistance comes in the form of a paranoia about poisoning ("What if I didn't seal the jars properly?") but there is really no reason to be so afraid of it. Plenty of people manage (and always used to manage) this without poisoning anyone; why not me? The very old Golden Wattle Cookbook in my kitchen drawer, despite needing much adaptation for a vegan cook, is full of practical information about this. (I did blanch and freeze several litres of our abundant broad beans recently, and tentatively used the first batch in dinner two days ago -- not without paranoia about the quantity of ice crystals they had gathered, despite my best efforts to pat them dry and freeze them quickly. But I would prefer to learn ways of preserving that aren't reliant on electricity as freezing is.)

3. Making vegan soap. Without palm oil. There are many vegan soaps around but almost all of them use palm oil (in place of animal fat). There was a company called Desert River (in Brookton, I believe) making soap that was animal- and palm-oil-free, but they don't seem to be on the net anymore. According to the Cruelty-Free Shop, Rambilldeene Farm soap uses "sustainable palm oil", so that may be the best option when buying from the supermarket, but I recently read an article that raised issues about the whole Round Table on sustainable palm oil thing... Best of all would be to make it oneself. I started humming and ha-ing about this more than five years ago... why have I not done it?

4. Ditto for making vegan candles. Then I'd have to worry about the provenance of the soy wax...

5. Do a permaculture course. I've been humming and ha-ing about this one for ages too. Hard to fit in when you've got a little kid, unless it's part-time and spread over several weeks. And needs adapting for vegans, since we don't import animals into the picture. (Though animals may come of their own accord and do what they do best -- as they already do on this block... but vegans don't eat them, eat from them, or keep them for use of any kind.) We already have a veganic veggie garden, and John has been a veganic gardener on and off for more than twenty years, but I would like to learn more about the principles of permaculture that could be useful to vegans.

6. Make paper, as John mentioned in an earlier post. It would make sense to recycle the paper we've already got, and some months ago I started to look into paper-making kits online and even bookmarked this site, but again, haven't "got around to it"...

7. This is last (for now) but not least. Do a first-aid course, a proper one with St John Ambulance, because I've been saying it for about seven or more years and I never actually take the step. I really loathe their t.v. ad, the one where they talk about the typical mother who did this and this and that but never made time to learn life-saving skills and so couldn't save her kid's life... I loathe it because it plays on a specifically feminine guilt, especially about having time for oneself, a career, whatever, as if that has to be at the expense of your kids. (If they showed a dad pursuing all his work and leisure activities and then said, "but he never made time to learn how to save a life", I might buy it.)

Nonetheless, guilt aside, it makes obvious sense to acquire these skills.

There are so, so many more. I will probably extend the list in a later post.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Bird life on the block

By Tracy

Just after we saw the second gwarder, Tim called out that there was a magnificent bird on the bank in front of the house.

It was this white-faced heron:

John Kinsella -- poems to accompany Niall Lucy's essay in Derrida Today

John Kinsella -- Five Derrida Poems

Fourth Essay on Linguistic Disobedience

“A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the laws of its composition and the rules of its game.”
Derrida

“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any society which I have not joined.”


Taking the fifth, he avoided the traffic. The organism
wasn’t feeling comfortable, though the sun bright and everything blue.
In the canyons, prayers are trapped halfway; cooling,
eventually dropping — churned up by pedestrians and cars. Advocacy
redecorates, brings in old fireplaces, pronounces
death-again sentences on leather chairs.
I have no clubs and no belonging, though the marks — amatory, elegiac, territorial,
arbitrary — left by beak of ladder-backed woodpecker, or the claws
of the twenty-eight parrot, on the bark of differing geographies,
erase none of my loyalties. This is not romanticism.
Continuation of lines of branches and twigs in the leafless woods
takes us back, imploded to fractals, hesitant at the solid point
of interruption: soundless. In the rock-garden
skinks move out of the tepid, a willy-willy
weaves garlands out of the crop: gamenya,
tall and high on protein. This house is stranded in that field,
the roof is giving way and red brick crumbling.
There’s a well nearby fed by a spring. Salt-rings
mark decline. Birds here are shunned
and strings of fragments come undone.
What’s of me here? he asks, memory
faster than time, the whole lot imploding.
His Auntie will not visit the farmhouse she raised
children in; her new place is decorated with photos
of the old place, a curatorial space. Recently he went out
to take a look, preparing a report then abandoning it to a carmine sunset —
insects thick on the windscreen. The twenty-eights tracked the car
as always, white cockatoos abandoned mallee trees.
At the cross-roads a shearer or young driver
cut sick: figure-eights and ‘doughnuts’ engraved deep.
On the sign at the corner of Mackey and Cold Harbour Roads,
a fox was impaled — its tail bristled like headgear.
Bounty hunters call it ‘poling’, or ‘shishkebabing’.
It’s what you do with ‘foreign muck’. A sharp taste
in their food brings it on. The Needlings burnt without
touching the paddocks — it doesn’t happen like this anywhere else,
as far as we know. Sheep spread out evenly,
as if placed to make something happen.
Belonging to this is not desirable.
Unbelonging, I make conversation
with like-minded people. A wedge-tailed eagle is seen
on a fence-post and none of the party wants to shoot it. I select
this society. The guns will overwhelm you! a sceptic declares, safe
in the anonymity of the world wide web. We will absorb
consequences. Sun burns even in winter here,
skin mutating. Its despotic face is passionate and unrelenting,
making language form. A spoonbill sifts units of water,
silt-heavy and charged with mosquito larvae,
in the gulch, creek, ravine, stream, gulley…
solubility, intactness… not a technical piece in a legal sense,
an ‘impressionistic’ account as a means of redress,
just ice concurrent with heat.


[From Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems, WW Norton, 2003]


Scratchings

That's the best place to look — today,
this morning, at this time of year:
it's bright and hot around there.
Two absences — the echidna

and meaning. Proof is here,
as told. Durable trees that hold
their leaves: hooves
breaking ground like Sensurround

and axe-blows ringing settlement.
Scratchings, markings that work
when working's almost done:
scant evidence of termites,

though phonic libraries resound.
In listening, close to ground.
Plosive catch and guttural plough.
Mother tongues and history.

You can't refer, an English critic
says: Saussure apocryphal and sporting
with locals — shooting signs
in road holes. Shout down,

public audit, echidna in parenthesis —
keeping low within perimeters
country town not promoted
within its written prejudices.


Heidegger and Poetry (Istrice 2)

for Niall Lucy

The logic
of the damaged
animal
outside the zoo —
a rarity —
ethical
as Greece,
gathering
of crows in twin dead trees
near the glue works: chain
lettering, so many;
so many of them.


So, opposition
in the open,
on the roadside
slightly out of view:
so low so slow
in abstaining
tall trees — just white gums
and red gums — people
passing knowing
only colour
generally —
you know, verticals,
the higher ups
the stretches
over the lower dead.


How do you timeframe fire
burning down
to prevent fire
in summer:

unfinished,
like heart
of lines:
behind
crow clusters
picking remnants:
vocabulary,
concordances,
lexicons,
third party
insurance?


I take the rollover,
quilled ball of tale,
give ground.


What do we give
on the up and up?
It’s the Southern Highway
I drive home. Honest,
that’s the route
of the errant.
Accidents
waiting to happen,
even where lanes
double — briefly
duplicate.


Echidna Elegy: IMM Jacques Derrida


Gross diagnosis is signed by the roadside;
or what a roadside might be if they wreck the trees,
take up access, if in scanning we take our spoken
presence; those diggings acclaimed and celebrated
prove to be rabbit testings, and not the echidna
we’d hoped for; does it make a difference?

I sense an echidna nearby and take pleasure
in this desire I might have as photograph
taken in shadow — a risk, an actual distance,
a narration wished out of hiding, though it’s too bright
for an echidna, blazoned affirmative to roll as cylinder,
coil in the tree-base hollow, bristle out of the cinders.

In everything the word echidna is echidna
where population is depleting, where a short
burst of termite activity — intense — brings
the liveness of monsters to propensity; where
are the anomalies? Where the historicity
of domestication and trauma? After the show

you sat with us and translated echidnas —
no language you’d have yourself recognise,
no language you’d have as event: the claw
clasped over our hands is the hand that digs,
its marks a transmission of shocked awakening,
diverting us from trails of proper meaning.


Canto of Abandoned Hope (Derrida and Dante, Inferno 3)

This is back-engineering. I have passed through the gate
and been through the bowels of the earth, passed out
into lambency. Today I took the children to Gwambygine,

to the bird lookout over one of the few permanent pools
left to the river. We stood quiet and then in the splay
of a dead tree a pair of Splendid Fairy Wrens

appeared, the bright male a gift out of death,
all tropes shed and risen over the riparian foliage.
Though its colour was muted and mutable,

the twitching of its tail diced bathos, calling
the female to the tine of the fork opposite. Intense.
Though vulnerable and breaking down,

swamp she-oak, paperbark, and even needle trees,
meliorated the floodfringe, bone-white with salt. The kids
were quiet but ecstatic, and said that though a sad window,

a precipice into a shadow place, the lookout becomes
a warning sign that passers-by just don’t get: it’s better
going there than avoiding the damaged remnants.

The light wasn’t strong though it was hot, an overcast
valley that compelled you to breathe slightly short, the end result
a semi-neutrality that was deceptive. We read on a metal sign:

possums might feed at night, hiding at day in a paperbark hollows
along the river, but foxes have probably caught them out,
on nights where dark translates the lambent less and less.


[From The Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography, WW Norton, 2008]

Coexistence

By Tracy

There's a family of bungarras living on our block... or, if you like, a family of humans living on the bungarras' block.

The bungarras are large, beautiful, and unafraid. A few days ago while I was here in the library/study, one of them approached the window, raised its neck, and looked directly at me through the glass.

Here's a photo of one of these bungarras:


















PS John and Tim just saw a huge hooded gwarder under a fig tree near the house. Tim immediately ran to get his reptile identification book (we are outside the "Perth region", but many of the creatures are here in the wheatbelt too), and then drew a big colourful picture of what he'd seen.

(If you click on the link to the reptile identification book, the one they saw is in the bottom left-hand corner of the cover: the orange/yellow snake with a black head.)

PPS I saw a gwarder too! John called me into the study this afternoon and there was another, the same kind but smaller, right in front of the window, running along the outside of Tim's (snakeproof) playground fence. It moved quickly up to the embankment and slid through the grass like something poured out: I thought of the snake drawings in Le Petit Prince and of Emily Dickinson's "A narrow fellow in the grass" -- Zero at the bone all right... and yet so beautiful. When I began to click the camera, the snake was in the sunlight; by the time I'd snapped, it was already in the shade and longer grass, so you can barely see it here. It's the orangeish curve among the orange gravel and rocks, toward the top left.

Pre Post-Net Declaration

By John

Well, it’s a long time between blog entries for me. I’ve got to get a number of poems up on the blog to link with a Niall Lucy essay that references them, and that is just appearing in the journal Derrida Today, published by Edinburgh University Press, so I might as well say a few words at the same time. I have been doing a lot of rethinking lately — not, as some neocon critics would like to see, to reform myself into a trudging maker of poem-artefacts that echo with creative-writing-encoded purity, but rather as extension of my views on environment and textual responsibility.

Some time early next year, I will be going off-line pretty well. I will have to maintain some computer access through my university research fellowship, and to communicate with students, but otherwise I am reverting to snailmail and a much diminished use of computer technology. I have been writing poetry in pen and on a manual typewriter since I was a kid, and once wrote entirely in pen and on a manual typewriter. I started using computers at a very young age and, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, used the first computer installed in a school in Western Australia (during the school holidays while it was being set up — in fact, I helped set it up), and started using computers for word processing back in the eighties. Anyway, it’s time to step off the techno bandwagon and revert.

A post-Luddite reaction? No, I am not advocating the smashing of computers (or anything), but ignoring them — the new weaving machines will simply vanish through neglect. I recently discovered, through Tracy’s genealogical researching, that my great-great-great-great-grandfather, and his father before him, and so on, back on my mother’s side, seem to have been frame-makers for weavers. The French heritage in the family comes via the frame-makers. Or maybe it was Flemish?

So, offline (largely), I guess I will tap Tracy for news of web goings-on as she will be remaining online. Next year, we hope to convert entirely to solar electricity for all household functions, and will likely have our own water supply. I will have a second manual typewriter and hope to start making my own paper of a reasonable enough quality to type on (and to last). I made paper with a mate back in the late eighties, but haven’t attempted to do so since then. As it’s law to keep the firebreaks done, I intend to mow them fairly wide and use the extensive cuttings from that as fibre for the paper-making. This shift in my relationship with the broader world will make a difference in my ‘literary life’ as well.

Some friends see it as a new form of eremitism, especially when combined with my abandonment of air travel (I will only now travel by car, bus, train or freighter — whichever is feasible and the less environmentally exacting), and reduction of travel in general. Tracy and I have even made steps toward reducing car usage in moving between country home and university (a long drive), but that’s another story. Maybe Tracy will talk about that on here next year. We’re adapting a different approach to movement, let’s say. There’s a long way to go, and it’s fraught with contradictions, but steps have to be made. It’s all very well writing about an ecology of place and of text (for that matter), but for me it’s essential to carry through to the pragmatics of day-to-day living.

A few asides. Just read Stendhal’s Lamiel, which despite its draft and unfinished status, is one of the strongest portraits by a male fictionalist of a female character ever written. (For Stendhal is a fictionalist — he NEVER wrote "novels" that were novels alone, and NEVER wrote pure non-fiction to my mind: his plagiarisms are a glorious extension of this ambivalence and textual undoing... and allowing myself to live in-parenthesis for a while longer, I will say that this post-modernist before modernism had taken hold, this engager with technology [the telegraph], this de-subjectifier of subjectivity, would necessarily have enjoyed the publication of his works in their incompleteness) I celebrate Lamiel!

Next year I am going to work on my new novel, Protest. Both Post-colonial and Morpheus will finally be appearing in 2009 with Papertiger Media with introductions by Nic Birns. Morpheus was written when I was seventeen-to-nineteen and resurrected (the word?) from manuscript archives by Paul Hardacre at Papertiger, and Post-colonial was originally drafted back in the mid-nineties after my time living on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, but reworked many times since then.

The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry is out in January 2009 — took most of this year and half of last year to sort. An exhausting but fascinating project.

The poet I am spending most time with at the moment is George Herbert. I returned to his work via ‘The Starre’.

Oh, and finally, I am going to post a couple of long poems I wrote four or so years ago when in Ohio. These poems are diatribes and are more about content than function, but nonetheless, I stand by what they’re attempting to do. And given the title of this blog, I thought the ‘mutual aid’ aspect of them pertinent!


Mutual Aid: a counter-epic (Parts 1 & 2)

by John Kinsella


'...[A] lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid," which was delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St. Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole subject. Kessler's idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This suggestion -- which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man – seemed to me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became acquainted with it (in 1883) I began to collect materials for further developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his lecture, but had not lived to develop. He died in 1881.'

and later in the introduction:

'The importance of the Mutual Aid factor -- "if its generality could only be demonstrated" -- did not escape the naturalist's genius so manifest in Goethe. When Eckermann told once to Goethe -- it was in 1827 -- that two little wren-fledglings, which had run away from him, were found by him next day in the nest of robin redbreasts (Rothkehlchen), which fed the little ones, together with their own youngsters, Goethe grew quite excited about this fact. He saw in it a confirmation of his pantheistic views, and said: -- "If it be true that this feeding of a stranger goes through all Nature as something having the character of a general law -- then many an enigma would be solved.'

from Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution — Peter Kropotkin, 1902

1.

The suggestion is modernist aesthetics — in part —
with pre-modernist technology. Hand-made paper,
enough wood to build a dwelling,
food grown communally.
To compose on the computer
would become vestigial memory,
an archetype separated from its separated
signifier. Science would be abandoned
in favour of science: local, specific,
healing. Curiosity would be tethered
instead of the beast, though a sunset
or a flower in its short display
would provoke endless contemplation,
even discussion. Dandies on the pavements
would take the tracks between fields,
paths through forests no longer felled
by machines and men who claim
there’s no other way to make a living.
The tofu-maker, the soap-maker, the broccoli
and sugar snap pea grower, the paper-maker,
the storm-fallen wood collector, the composter,
the recycler, the forge for small works of iron,
people pulling their own ploughs on shared lands
where no one is master or mistress,
where belief is without power
to make others believe,
where the smoke of fires
for cooking and warmth
won’t finish off the atmosphere
because no factories no cars
are pumping out their crap, and only
the odd train or ambulance makes use of tracks
and roads kept up like gold, once worshipped
as just a glimmer that fuelled false economies
that could never add up. In letting the edges
of things grow out into the waste spaces,
and the cow and sheep become the cow and sheep again,
occupying their respective spaces and not vast
areas of land that should never have been cleared,
where an animal is an animal and not a pharmaceutical
laboratory that prolongs human life so it can collectively
witness the collapse of the entire biosphere,
living long enough to enjoy the apocalypse
whichever prophecy you live by, deny, or ignore.
Try walking the plough lines without fences,
try gender liberation without General Electric
who did much more than all of French theory
or American liberationists who only existed
because of General Electric, try sharing out time
and work and thinking space without power sources:
liberation will be genuine and not exploitation
dressed up as something better. Try any form
of social progress without the “contribution
to the modern nation” which never holds up anyway
and is quickly and not-so-quietly rebuffed
or repressed or even consumed
by a moral majority: another lie of democracy
that represents only those doing the representing.
The majority’s false majority making degrees
of separation a perversity, an irony
when it’s the majority who hate perversity
so much. Try it without armies and police forces
and yes, even traffic lights. Try it without weapons.
Flights of birds are worth noticing. As are anemones
on reefs close to shore, as you walk onto the kelpy
wash, just leaving things be. The light is revelatory
here at any time of day in any kind of weather.
Light is pure physics and the distance
from the sun, the play of other cosmic forces,
is an active part of our day, our looking.
If the scrub and dune growth are left untouched
the sandhills won’t drift inland in the same way.
There is something to be said for a co-existence
where natural barriers protect you from the worst
of things, often. The body predicts the weather
if you listen closely. Rings around the moon
are common knowledge in the small community.
Etymology is the growth of the word
on the fringes of communities,
an exchange of languages.
The song is carried across
lines of distance like red sap
down the craggy bark of eucalypts.
Observations taken from high ground resonate
through a district, and field trials
don’t glow more than the sky around the hills.
Bats hacking air around the caves
rise up like prayers without conversion,
and neighbours are not tamed by them.
Slippage of snow and desert sand
is anecdotal and tough in air-conditioned
modernity: people are still, and moving,
and both pass by each other
as weather and conditions
change. Erosion on the tree-line
that seems so bound when clearing ends
and salinity is in retreat, is noticed
by the child visiting day after day into old age.
Lacrimae rerum is music
in leaves mapped to this place:
roots adjusting, at their own pace?

2.

People can belong where they are. They
can belong in more than one place. Place
need not be damaged by their belonging;
nor people in that place displaced.
None of this is mutually exclusive.
Culture is the contrivance of marginalisation.
Democracy makes culture of other peoples’ spaces.
Nocturnal animals in the forest
are hard to track — they mostly keep to the branches.
The researchers out with their spotlights
give themselves employment. Research
is consumerism and the sci-fi “urge” that excuses
all investigation. Rumour has it,
they defined their humanity
by differing versions of colonisation.
You’ll listen if you want to hear it,
unless the language persuades
that language is enough,
against personal preference.
What moment in childhood
made you go like this?
Stamp collecting? Buying
your first weapon — a Norica air-rifle?
The smell of soldering flux
like cold teeth and accidents;
the intense itch of buffalo grass
and the wondering why
next door had softer grass;
jagged splinters from climbing
the grey wooden picket fences;
unearthing tiny potatoes
from a vegetable patch
left for years; smoking
rolled up newspaper;
crushing cans in a vice;
the work-in work-out
motivation of a pedal car
grinding across blue metal
hacked out of the hills
leaving a massive wound
that will never be healed;
the chemical structure
of glow-in-the-dark ghosts
when they first hit the market;
doing bob-a-jobs for cub scouts
and wondering why you’d want to worship
your Auntie Jackie as head of the pack;
turning your bookshelves
into a library and getting entangled
in the Dewey Decimal system;
being fascinated by lichens,
toadstools, mushrooms, and puff balls;
unravelling the wirework
of those corner bush generators,
the magneto flowers of the banksia,
apposition of gnarled bark and sublimely
intricate stamens; the possibilities
of test tube, florence flask,
conical flask, u-tube, eye-melt
of magnesium ribbon,
the dissolution of flowers;
the dynamics of a Coke bottle
with possible prize printed in crimped lid
exploding in the freezer;
indelible pencils and fountain pens
with swirls of plastic representing shell
and books of Malay written in these
in the bottom drawer of the kitchen
built-in cabinet; the Mettler stove;
the Wonderheat; the slabs of glass
slices of heat blackening
in the jarrah burn-off,
the bite then split
along the seams of the forest —
pit saws, water-spray backpack
with canvas webbing;
records of the growth rates of trees;
Sidchrome spanners; grease guns;
jacks for trucks; an oil pit;
a well without a pump: so deep
you remember it being dug;
sheep killed and frozen.
a kangaroo eating the phosphated grass;
a guinea pig bitten by a redback
with hair against the grain
no matter which way you rubbed;
quails in aviaries with their perfect
grounded eggs; parrots
caged from the northern wheatbelt;
shell grit, cuttlefish, squid jags;
the smell of the visiting Craven A
cigarette salesman who didn’t smoke
himself; Airfix glue and Humbrol paint
cocktailing biorythmically,
making the heart faster
in the dark: spitfires, mustangs,
stukas in the ethical mosh-pit;
Sly and the Family Stone,
Elton John’s Crocodile Rock,
Nana Mouskouri and black and white rags,
Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata,
Elvis Presley, poster-boy;
Das Kapital; God and the State;
back door-handles turning
at night; a boarder’s easy skankin
Bob Marley; gun-cotton and the colours
of burning; whale-oil-soaked burley;
spear-fishing? Sex on the roof of a Simcar?
Combat and war movies watched religiously,
and Charlton Heston as large as life — later —
around Columbine. He is aware that the Hawks
want to go into Iran, might already be in Iran
according to the article about to appear in the New Yorker,
who laments... almost wistfully, his Moses
off-side for a split second... that the civil rights
battles of the 50s had to be endured at all.
Age is no deterrent. Michael Moore
is also a victim of his own patriotism.
The growing of feed is an aid to futurity.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Vegan cake

By Tracy

How to cheer up a kid who's been home from school
not feeling too good --
but whose appetite is just fine...