Inaugural Post, and a Poem

As I will be spending the majority of the summer abroad, I decided that the best way to keep in touch with all of you is to start this journal, which I hope will be a log of all the shenanigans I'll be up to, culinary or otherwise. This way, rather than imagining me sipping coffee under a wide-brimmed hat in a Viennese café - as I am sure you are wont to do - you can see pictures! Also, I refuse to furtively check Facebook at odd hours of the night (thank you, eight-hour time difference).

The phrase "What peaches and what penumbras!" comes from an Allen Ginsberg poem about - what else? - food and writing and everything else important. I just saw an exhibition of his photography at the National Gallery, which I highly recommend: it's enough to make you nostalgic for decades in which you never even lived. Half the fun was in reading the captions he wrote at the bottom of each one, but words weren't necessary to describe the living honesty of those snapshots.

A Supermarket in California

by Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo- biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?