stories

The summer issue of Verbsap features two of our Friday Nght Writers: Tom Lassiter ("Lawns count, take mine, a beautiful carpet of St. Augustine, kinda an oasis in this damn crazy world. And it is crazy, right?") and Neil Crabtree ("For a moment, I regretted what I’d said. Her face twitched around the eyes and she looked away, blinking, like someone awakened from a faint with smelling salts under her nose.")

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Written by John Dufresne On In Tagged

natasha

A new Nabokov story in the New Yorker.  "On the stairs Natasha ran into her neighbor from across the hall, Baron Wolfe. He was somewhat laboriously ascending the bare wooden steps, caressing the bannister with his hand and whistling softly through his teeth."

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george garrett 1929-2008

America has lost a great man of letters.  George Garrett was as generous a man as I've ever met.  A couple of years ago, I e-mailed him for advice about a contest I was judging. His eyesight was by then so bad he couldn't read much on the computer.  He sent me a long letter in response in his big script.  I felt terrible I had intruded.  And he was funny and charming.  He could have done stand-up, and sometimes he did.  I'll miss him.  Here's an interview with Archipelago.  George taught at FIU for a year before I was here and came as a visiting writer.  He was also on the staff of our writing conference one year.  Here's aVQR remembrance with links to essays about George. (thanks to Ran in Charlottesville) Three poems by George Garrett.

 

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the golden voice of the great southwest

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5YoLjYD8QE]U. Utah Phillips has died.  My friend Frances Friedman had told me about Phillips when he came to meetings of the San Francisco Folk Club back in the Sixties.  And then I got a chance to see him perform at Prospect House, a neighborhood center in the Laurel-Clayton neighborhood of Worcester in about 1973 or so.  There weren't thirty people there that afternoon, and he sang his heart out.  He convinced me to get my Wobblie card, and I became a member of the IWW.  (It might be time for me to re-up.)  He was as close to Woody Guthrie as we got in my lifetime--a vagabonding troubadour and labor organizer.  He was a treasure that not very many people knew about.  Mike in Worcester and Joe in Sunrise wrote me today about Utah, Joe reminding me how he toured a lot with Rosalie Sorrels.  Here's a look at Utah trough the years.

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more london food

I forgot to mention a wonderful and busy London restaurant in my post earlier this week.  It's called Tapas Brindisa and it's beside the Borough Market and a short walk from the London Bridge tube stop.  I had a spectacular grilled chorizo and among Jeannie D., James Bond (yes, I'm serious), Cindy, and me, we also ate fired potatoes, asparagus ham, pork fillet, chorizo omelette, picos (Monte Enebro goat cheese with almond), and chicken livers.  All washed down with Cruzcampo beer for me, and wine for my friends.  We had to wait an hour and a half for a table but found a nearby pub to have a pint. The wait was worth it.  As Cindy says, No more bad food.


 


 

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british food

Our pal Joe from Cheese (Queso, Tejas) wanted to know if we ate any great food in London, figuring no one would believe it if we did.  We did, and here are the highlights.  The Anchor & Hope pub in Southark near the Waterloo Underground was mobbed and noisy and we found out why.  I ate fried sand eels, which reminded me of the majuas we get in Cuban restaurants in Miami--fried in a light batter and slightly spicy, spectacular; some of Jeannie's grilled razor clams; and roast pigeon and braised trevise, a bitter red Italian lettuce; Cindy and Jeannie shared a whole roast sea bass; John had a shrimp pot.  The place was chaotic but our host James got us a seat in ten minutes after telling us we'd have to wait an hour and a half--maybe because lots of other frustrated and belligerant diners were giving him a hard time, and we were, of course, sweet.  Cindy and I had lunch one afternoon at Chowki, just off Picadilly Circus.  The restaurant features three cuisines from the Indian subcontinent: Pakistan, Calcutta, and Coorg.  Three different cuisines of the thirty-six in India are chosen each month.  I had Pakistani diced lamb tikka with spicy yogurt fennel marinade and from Coorg, fried sardines, and Cindy had a curried chicken stew.  The bread was mator-chuti Kachoori, a deep-fried whole wheat bread stuffed with peas and spices--it was superb.  On the last night in town after the ninth of our Shakespeare plays, Richard III, finished, we all went out to Soho for a meal at Arbutus.   It happened to be our twenty-third wedding anniversary.  Cindy and I ordered the risotto of garlic leaves, spring onion, and courgette (zuchinni), and it was simply the best risotto I've ever had.  Creamy and savory.  And we had a delicious Edinburgh-brewed Innis & Gunn oak-aged beer that was sweet, malty, with a slight whisky taste.  (Whisky, not whiskey, since Scotch is spelled without the e.)  You can eat well in London, but not cheaply.  The gas was about $10 a gallon (where we in the States are headed; it's $4.00 at some area stations in South Florida) and some food prices have doubled in the last month, we were told.  A pint of most beers in a pub averaged $7. 

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